Quotes

about : Other people about Björk
Graham Massey

Elle m’a appelé un jour sans me dire qui elle était. Elle voulait des renseignements sur une histoire de programmation. J’ai tout de suite reconnu sa voix et comme nous cherchions une voix féminine pour l’un de nos morceaux...

lien citation
À propos des masques

Björk and I are both naturally introverts, but we kind of like doing extroverted things, and a mask allows you to do that in a really beautiful way.

lien citation
Aaron

( French rock duo )

This girl is genius. She created her own universe.

lien citation
Akiko Grace

Björk is an artist in a different genre of music, but she is just terrific for the originality of her musicianship, which stands above all else, and because she expresses her own voice and develops her own sound.

lien citation
Alexander McQueen

"She really gives you free rein, and
she listens to everything and everyone. She just absorbs people, and
that’s why she comes out with so many different and brilliant ideas.

She inspired me for a
collection I did for Givenchy with the cover of Homogenic ; just the way
she was talking inspired me to think differently."

lien citation
Alexander Skarsgard (The Northman) à propos de Björk

Je ne pense pas qu’on le voit à la caméra dans cette scène, mais on l’a tournée dans cette grange enflammée après un saccage. Et lors de sa scène, Björk avait derrière elle cette gigantesque pleine lune, juste derrière sa tête, et ça semblait parfait pour cette scène, son personnage et ce dont elle avait l’air. C’était absolument hypnotisant et tellement incroyable. (...) Elle était adorable. C’est un esprit unique et c’était une nuit incroyable. Je vais en Islande chaque année parce que mon meilleur ami est de là-bas, alors j’ai passé du temps avec elle l’été dernier et elle juste super cool. C’est la meilleure.

lien citation
Alison Goldfrapp

Apparently I’m supposed to be having a lesbian affair with Björk, but she’s married to Matthew Barney.

lien citation
Alistair Beattie

Alistair Beattie is from Me Company, which produced and directed the ’Hunter’ video.

Why a bear ?

We use the bear as a literal symbol of strength, ferocity, self-determination and the North, a pioneering roaming spirit. Hunter is a song about two different states, that of the hunter and the gatherer. The polar bear is the perfect symbol of the hunter state, it polarizes (ahem !) the difference between the two into something really extreme and magical. The choice of a techno-bear, though, has more to do with the idea of the beating heart of technology. Björk’s music often has a dialogue between organic forms and techno forms, and we share this interest. It’s not photoreal ; it’s able to collapse itself and rebuild itself at will. We had no desire to make it naturalistic.

Why is it so stark ?

The video is something like a koan or a haiku — it tries to ask the question in the most interesting manner possible. We wanted the effects to be done right in front of your eyes ; we didn’t want things to be hidden or faked or obscured. The magic and illusion are all the more powerful when it doesn’t feel like it’s being performed behind a veil of smoke and mirrors.

Is it easy to do this kind of morphing on computers ?

The technical skills required to do this kind of work are found only in a very few places, and we were lucky to land ourselves with a team of incredibly talented people at Digital Domain. What’s more interesting to us is that so much technology was used in such an invisible way. We never wanted the process to obscure the result. The nature of the special effects experience is that you don’t know how it was done ; the illusion is "sold" to you and you either buy it or you don’t. The heart and soul of the piece was Björk’s performance ; we shot 12 takes and then selected the best. The mantra throughout the production was that the performance must drive the computer graphics.

How much did it cost to make ?

This is not a question that we feel comfortable answering. Can we ask you a question ? What relevance does the bear have to good modern product design ?

I don’t know.

Transformative products are exciting, but robo-pets are even more exciting. We were interested in making the technology very visible, but also playing with translucency and transparency, soft boundaries. The irony of the digital age is that, as technology gets more invisible, people are more interested in being able to see it again, as in Apple Computer’s iMac, with its translucent blues and milky plastics that simultaneously tease and reveal.

What does Björk think of the video ?

She thinks it is "techno," one of her favorite words.

lien citation
Amy Lee (Evanescence)

Evanescence singer Amy Lee says the only time she ever got starstruck was when she met her idol, Bjork, at a Japanese music festival. Bjork was the headliner the night before Evanescence played.

It was the first time for me to see her perform, it was raining, and she was amazing and I cried the whole time. And MTV in Japan is insane, so MTV has a video camera
on me the whole time watching Björk’s performance and they’re not taping her performance, they’re taping my face watching her perform. It was really funny. So I’m,
like, sobbing. You get to where you just ignore the camera, but it was weird.

Afterward, Lee met Björk in her dressing room and got an invitation to share some bubbly.

She’s like, ’Why don’t you stay and have some champagne ?’. And all the people in the room were looking at us. And I looked at the champagne and my eyes started getting stingy. And I was just like, ’Nah, actually, I have to get up really early. I better go.’ And I only talked to her for less than a minute because I knew I was about to cry. I could have killed myself after. But I knew I couldn’t stay.

lien citation
Amy Lee (Evanescence)

Björk’s very, very big for me in a lot of ways. There are so many things that she does that when I hear it, I think, she’s gonna get [criticized] for this. Because nobody’s gonna understand it. And she doesn’t fit into this perfect, hot-girl, strong-woman category.

lien citation
Amy Lee (Evanescence)

I want one Björk song because she’s such a huge influence for me. I always liked this song from Homogenic. It’s called Joga and the chorus goes "State of emergency. It’s where I want to be". It has these huge lush strings and it’s so beautifully musically. I have no idea what she’s talking about, but the music is insanely cool.

lien citation
Amy Lee (Evanescence)

I have every single thing she’s put out. Her emotions are so complicated, just like all of ours. She doesn’t try and dumb them down and make them pretty.

lien citation
Amy Sedaris

I like so many of her songs and [Venus as a boy] is one of them.

lien citation
Andrea Corr (The Corrs)

I really love the album Nellee made with Björk - it’s one of my favourite albums ever.

lien citation
Andrew (The Brodsky Quartet)

Wow - that evening with Tavener - I wish my writing could describe well enough what an evening that was ! When we meet Björk we always have a laugh and reminisce about that ’top night’ (her words of course..). If you’re interested in his music (actually he’s about as close to Björk’s music as you can get in the classical world) could I recommend a piece called "the Protecting Veil" for ’cello and orchestra. It’s one of his ’big’ hits and sums up what you’re likely to get from him. I wish I could tell you what I know about the piece...

The live album from the Union Chapel. Well... on your web site
there’s a denial that this is happening. However there was an announcement in NME that it is happening. I can confirm that it will be available. Soon. Very soon, we hope.

lien citation
Andrew Huang à propos de Björk

Working with Björk on Vulnicura was really informative for a ton of reasons. One being that I admire how she uses her personal autobiography – she’s so fearless in making work that’s essentially a self-portrait, but she’s heightening it and making it transpersonal and archetypal. That’s what makes her such a powerhouse.

lien citation
Andrew Huang à propos de Björk

I’ve been doing work with Björk for the past four years. We did Vulnicura together, which was like, so heavy — and fun and exciting.

lien citation
Andrew Huang à propos de Björk

I’m a fan, you know ? I admit. I remember her videos on MTV. I remember hearing Post and Debut, but the first time I saw Bjork was in that “Hunter” video. Not that I could vocalize it at the time, but the combination of the optimism and futurist, kind of future-facing mentality of her music, you know ?

lien citation
Angel Olsen

I saw Bjork. I’d never seen her live. I wouldn’t say a festival is the best way to judge a performance from an artist because it’s not always the most comfortable and sound is always escaping— no matter how great the sound guy is. But I had a great time listening, even with all those factors in mind.

lien citation
Anohni à propos de Björk et des questions climatiques

Nous avons beaucoup parlé de l’environnement au fil des ans, simplement en tant qu’artistes, cherchant à comprendre la juste mesure de notre relation face à cette crise et les différentes façons dont nous pourrions utiliser notre influence en tant qu’artistes », a-t-elle déclaré. « Elle a toujours été une optimiste profondément inspirante et émouvante. »

lien citation
Antony Hegarty

Working with Björk was really inspiring. It was really amazing to see like a master. She’s like a master. Working in the studio was like "wow, look at that !". I couldnt keep up. It was like 300 % to my 100 %. It was like "wow oh god, look at her sing". She’s a madcap its unbelievable. She’s just so chilling. Maybe those tracks will pop up somewhere who knows we havent really decided yet. I dont know what her record..until she says its on her record I dont know if its really true.

lien citation
Antony Hegarty

She kind of rescued me at a very exhausted moment in my life. She brought me into her creative sanctuary and it was such a relief.

lien citation
Antony Hegarty

I admire Björk’s career a great deal because she isn’t beholden to others, she’s so free. Everyone listening wants to be free. Everyone wants to shout out and express themselves. We listen to a singer to bathe in the truth of her freedom.

lien citation
Apparat

(Apparat is a German electronic musician. His real name is Sacha Ring)

Im sitting in a bus through the south of mexico listening to vespertine and ’Harm of will’ gave me such a cold shower. I forgot how good this record is. Whenever only one person in the world experiences that listening to my record I can basically stop making music. It’ll be done then.

lien citation
Arca à propos de Björk

Sans les encouragements amicaux de Björk, je n’aurai jamais eu le courage nécessaire de chanter, pour la première fois, sur mon nouvel album. Si la plupart des paroles ont été improvisées, l’influence spirituelle de Björk a infiltré mon subconscient pour la chanson Anoche.

lien citation
Arca à propos de Björk et son album Reverie

She’s given me advice on anything, (from) live show, arranging, how to breathe, how to sing, when to bow, when to fight, when to search, when to hold stillness" explique Arca. "its not just advice as a musician, it’s how she unlock things in ithers simply by seeing them on a deep level."

lien citation
Arca à propos de la tournée Vulnicura

you know what changed my life ? being a part of this tour. laughter & tears & heart. Vulnicura Live is out now and features Vulnicura live features some of my remixes of older Björk songs I love a lot 2, hope u like em ! !!!!!! kisses all over ur forehead @bjork

lien citation
Arni Matthiasson

When I wanted to talk to Björk, I’d call her at home, or just drop in, but all of a sudden everything has changed. You have to go through official channels now. But she’s had to detach herself because everyone wants a piece. Some people think she’s arrogant because of that, but at Easter an Icelandic writer did a long interview with her on state television which improved her perceived image - she was down to earth, open and honest.

She is a bit of a hero : when somebody makes it big abroad, which doesn’t happen very often in Iceland, it’s like ’Our Björk’. Her only defect is that she is too honest. She’s very stubborn too : stubborn, honest and talented.

lien citation
Ashlee Simpson

( about "All Is Full of Love " )

This has such a cool vibe to it. It connects everyone.

lien citation
Asmundur Jonsson

(Works for Japis, Icelandic importer and distributor. Runs Bad Taste Ltd, The Sugarcubes’ multi-media company.)

I first met Björk when she was a member of Exodus. She was a very strong personality, singer and performer. She was greater than the music. No, I would never say that she was crazy, she was more a nice human being. She always had a voice that you would recognise. When you see footage from the early period, you really notice that skill of hers, as there are other vocalists to compare her to. She’s always been a part of a group of people that are very creative...

lien citation
Badi Assad

I admire her courage to dive within herself. She never makes any concessions ! She does whatever she wants. She has a thrilling voice and style ! She has incredible songs and lyrics. I listen to her very often.

lien citation
Bebel Gilberto

People have told me what I’m doing inspires them, and that same thing has happened to me - I remember Sade’s ’Promise,’ and those great records by Bjork, they just hit me on my heart. ... If I can be involved like that, and inspire someone just a little bit, I’m a very very happy girl.

lien citation
Bebel Gilberto

This song ( Isobel )
is a beautiful piece on Bjork’s wonderful album Post, it totally inspired me forever.

lien citation
Bono

See björk is an extraordinary performer, she’s amazing. Never a puppet, she holds her own strings in her hands.

lien citation
Bragi Olafsson

(The Sugarcubes’ bassist. Has retired from music to concentrate on writing poetry and prose, funded by the Icelandic government as well as partaking in Bad Taste Ltd business.)

One time in Lithuania she got hilariously drunk. She stormed into the hotel bar where all the rest of were sitting. We couldn’t believe our eyes. She started dancing around the bar, and I remember her taking down the big TV screen which was elevated from the floor, up near the ceiling, and putting it on the floor. The bartenders threw her out... I am very proud of how she operates in the music business, that she hasn’t lost that independent attitude that The Sugarcubes had. I also admire the way, when she is approached by boring old pop stars like David Bowie and Simon Le Bon to sing with her, she just says no. Although she is famous now, she doesn’t get fooled.

lien citation
Catherine Deneuve

There is no point in expecting logical behaviour. You have to her accept her like she is, wild, unique.

lien citation
Catherine Deneuve

We worked closely together, but I wouldn’t say we are friends, she’.... Well, we
live in different countries, and we speak different languages.

lien citation
Cedric Bixler-Zavala (The Mars Volta)

Who’s your biggest influence vocally ?

I’d have to say, it’s always been Björk. I took a job in 92 and U2 came to town for uh... I can’t remember the album, but I worked putting all the stage gear together and it was Public Enemy, Sugarcubes and U2. That was one of my first cassettes, "Life Is Good" by Sugarcubes.

She’s just always... she’s another person who sets the standard, you know, she just - what, she made a record where it’s just vocals-only, all the instrumentation is vocals. There you go, that sets - that’s who you have to be pretty much, you know. Yeah, she’s a pretty phenomenal influence - everything she’s ever done has been really really interesting, you know.

lien citation
Chris Buck

Björk had an almost singular interest in the more superficial aspects of being photographed : the colors used or clothing worn, etc. She explained that she tries to communicate a sense of her music in photographs (because people are more sophisticated visually than aurally) in order to prepare her audience, or potential audience, for the music itself. A source of frustration for me was that in filling out a portrait with fashion shoot trimmings (she wanted the fan blowing her hair all of the time, for example) it seemed to camouflage more than it conveyed about her as a person, or even as an artist.

The meaningful moments in the shoot were when she moved toward something that was sexual and vulnerable. At one point, she cupped her breasts, and at another, she pulled up her dress/jacket toward her crotch. Perhaps it was just normal human sexuality coming through her as a performer, but my instincts told me there’s something darker going on for her sexually.

lien citation
Chris Cunningham

When I first heard the track I wrote down the words ; ’sexual’, ’milk’, ’white porcelain’, ’surgery’, recalls Chris.

His immediate association with sex was vindicated when Björk arrived at his London office with a book of Chinese Kama Sutra prints as her only guiding reference.

I knew them and liked them, but I couldn’t figure out how to keep the explicit sexuality and still make it broadcastable... It’s a combination of several fetishes : industrial robotics, female anatomy, and flourescent light in that order. It was perfect, I got to play around with the two things I was into as a teenager : robots and porn.

lien citation
Chris Cunningham

My initial idea was to have a final stage where the two robots unfold like a flower as they mate. We couldn’t manage it, but perhaps it’s just as well, as the music doesn’t really allow for it. To be perfectly honest I didn’t have time to make the set look exactly as I wanted it, so I made it post heavy. I think I lost confidence that there was enough happening, and this put pressure on an already six-figure budget.

lien citation
Chris Cunningham

Every single shot in the video has about four layers. The first element is the shot of the set and the robot prop doing nothing, which we’d film for about 21 seconds. We’d then remove the prop Björk robot and put (the real) Björk in with her face painted white and wearing a blue suit. Using a mix of the (master shot and a live feed of Björk in frame) on the video monitor, we’d then try to match up as much as possible. It was a pretty crude and fairly terrifying method of shooting the video. For the Avid editing, I basically had a series of stills of a robot on a set and some crude shots of Björk wearing a blue suit with her face painted white. There was a definite feeling of insecurity all the way until the first couple of shots were finished in post, when I could finally tell whether it was working or not."

Then I started ... having ideas for ways of making the video better... So we were kind of improvising stuff in post. Up until that point I had absolutely no faith whatsoever in computer graphics, and now I’m more of a convert, really.

lien citation
Chris Evans

I threw several bands off TFI, it was really fun they couldn’t believe, Bjork was being a total arse one day and i just told her to go, four hours before transmision, she thought it was a joke until I told the security guards to escort her off the premises. The decision left an eleven minute hole in our running order, so I phoned a young director up called Guy Ritchie and asked him if he’d like to come on and talk about this new film I’d heard about called, "Lock, Stock and something," the rest as I’m sure you know is history, as now is Bjork, ha ha ! Karma, karma, karma.

lien citation
Chris Walla (Death Cab For Cutie)

Dear Bjork,
I’m sorry. We have to break up.

This may come as a shock to you. After all, we’ve been together for more than fifteen years. I distinctly remember the day we met, in January of 1988, when you sang ’Birthday’ to me from my mom’s car radio. It was the week after Christmas, and we were on our way to the mall for the sales, and it wasn’t my birthday. Whatever, it’s cool. I probably spent most of my money on an acrylic cardigan from the Squire Shop, but I saved eight dollars to buy your band’s new cassette (I got the green one ; I wished I was richer so I could buy all four flavors). I learned all the words, even the ones that made very little sense indeed. Because that’s what you do when you’re in love : You take the weird with the good, Einar inclusive.

It was all wine and roses for a few years ; the following Sugarcubes records were solid, if not as spectacular as the first. I was nervous when you struck out on your own in 1994, but it really turned out alright ; your first solo effort was effortless, and your second was as bold as it is pink. Homogenic was gorgeous, but it was then that I started to wonder if our love was meant to be. It was your first record of songs that sounded like what people figure a Bjork song should sound like. Does that make sense ? You’ve gotten so hard to communicate with. It didn’t used to be like this.

And then, Vespertine. A little whisper of a record, a light. Unassuming and floaty as feathers, right down to the artwork. It was clear in 2001 that you still loved me, you told me so.

So what’s up with Medulla ? I thought we had an understanding, that it was all working. That you’d continue to write songs, really good ones, and present them in a way that’s inventive enough to love, not inventive enough to hate. I mean, really. What *are* you doing ? It’s cool to follow your muse. I believe in that concept completely. She has been kind to you for many moons. But whatever she’s been telling you behind my back for these last three years — they’re all lies. You’ve been duped by a muse who is in a Bobby McFerrin phase. This is wrong.

It’s sad, I know. You must be wondering why this is so abrupt, why my generally fair and tolerant demeanor is gone, why I’ve assumed the voice of a Pitchfork reviewer. And you’re right, I don’t like this sort of vitriol. But I think it’s important for you to understand that it’s not me. It’s you. I don’t hate you, I never could. But clearly you need your space, and I’m happy to give it to you if this is the soundtrack.

I’ll call you sometime. It may be awhile, as it is when these things happen. Maybe on your birthday. Until then, take care of yourself and wear your seatbelt.

Chris.

lien citation
Christina Aguilera

I think she’s exciting. And I think what she brings to the table is very different, and I think she’s one that also pushes the envelope in getting people to think outside of their own safety boxes. I think what she does is very, very interesting.

lien citation
Christina Kyriacou

(One Little Indian press officer.)

We were doing a photo shoot in Iceland, around Reykjavik. We went to The Blue Lagoon, a popular attraction, but we went first thing in the morning as it’s mainly Icelanders there, not tourists. There were these old people there, to take in the medicinal benefits, and Björk hadn’t got her bathing costume, so she was running around trying to get one, and these old ladies were clasping her hand, going, Oh Björk, well done, acting like her grandma, but Björk had never met them before. Whenever she goes back to Iceland now, that’s how people are toward her : they all feel they own a part of her, and that Björk is a part of Iceland.

lien citation
Corine

C’est une des premières artistes à avoir débarqué avec un visuel très fort. Une maîtrise incroyable de ce qu’elle a envie de montrer, de donner, un truc anti-star système aussi. C’est la musique, l’art qui parle et qui prime !

lien citation
Corinne Bailey Rae

I never heard that kind of singing, and she basically is giving artists the license to try things. It’s childish, yet also advanced musically. It makes you rethink what you can do vocally.

lien citation
Corinne Bailey Rae

I love the imagery [in Isobel] of this girl secluded in a forest, like a fairytale and the rising chorus and all the vocal layers are so insistent.

lien citation
Cyndi Lauper

I love this next artist - Bjork. I don’t just love her for the fact that she has constantly pushed the envelope and constantly done interesting work, but because this piece was connected to Dancing In The Dark for me, because Dancing In The Dark was about a woman who her daydreams kinda got her through when she looked at everything as a musical.

And this next song is one of the songs that shows her ability to be in a musical number, and it’s so sick and twisted in a way - I love her. I love her spirit. And this is what this video celebrate - her spirit. Her free spirit.

Um, what is it, is it "Quiet" ?
"When it’s so Quiet" ?
("It’s Oh So Quiet")
That’s it. It’s and old song, and it’s called "It’s Oh So Quiet". I have many names for it, I know, but that’s the official one - that’s the real title. "It’s Oh So Quiet" by Bjork.

lien citation
Damian Taylor

( the making of "Volta" )

Björk didn’t have a manifesto for this record .She only wanted it to be a bit more extroverted than some of her previous records. And she wanted it raw and pretty rude, which are the words she was using. Unlike having a very definitive description of how [the record] was going to sound like she did with Homogenic or Vespertine, it was more of an exploration of the whole process. She wanted to have an adventure, like jumping off a cliff, just going somewhere and working with someone without preconceived ideas — what happens when you put Björk in a room with Toumani Diabaté or Konono N1 and hit go, basically.

***

On Vespertine, we went as superhigh-tech as we possibly could. Every single sound was chopped up on a grid, and I would be drawing in little clicks and pops by hand. It was really meticulous, but with this record, we agreed that we find that approach a bit tired. Now we want stuff to be very raw, basically. It wasn’t so much like Björk would sit down with Pro Tools and loop something up for 4 bars on 16th notes ; she would choose several bits or phrases and direct where she wanted them. She will sit down at the rig and hack away, but when there is an intricate bit of editing, she makes good use of her time in making decisions, like, ‘How do we shorten that syllable ?’

***

"Vertebrae" was actually created out of a loop manipulating the different channels of the 5.1 mix, as opposed to having them play out in a conventional timeline. The beats were originally programmed with 808 kicks and static-y noises. I used NI Kontakt for the snare-drum rolls and really careful programming. I layered up a whole bunch of different snare samples and detuned them and used some randomization to spread them out. And then I added an orchestral kick-drum sample and orchestral percussion to replace the electronic stuff. The swooshing sounds are some white noise that I automated with EQs in Pro Tools. Originally, I took that sample from a Moog software synth, used a white-noise generator, recorded a bunch of noise and automated some high and lowpass filters and Pro Tools EQ3, and I used the Echo Farm plug-in as well.

***

Because we didn’t work in one central studio, we had a full-on HD rig in a flight case that we carried around with us in a soundproofed Isobox case. That was critical because we usually set up in a hotel room or a cabin, and we didn’t have a separate control room. We used all the EQs and plug-ins in HD and the different Pro Tools rigs in the different studios. I was minimalist with the plug-ins. I used the stock Digi stuff. If you actually A/B the really expensive, esoteric third-party stuff against the Digi stuff, it holds up really well and, in some cases, a lot better. I used the stock Digi EQ2 and EQ3. And I am a huge fan of Lo-Fi, one of the best Pro Tools plug-ins because it is so versatile, and depending on where you put it in the chain, you can get a lot of different effects out of it. On Volta, a lot of the vocal effects are a combination of those EQs and compression, before and after Lo-Fi. If you squash something really hard, brighten it up, then hit Lo-Fi gently with a little bit of distortion and 1 on saturation, then re-EQ it afterwards, you will get a totally different kind of roughness than if you put Lo-Fi in front of the chain then squash it. It’s a huge thumbs-up for stock Digi plug-ins !

lien citation
Dan Wilson (Semisonic)

Everything she does is incredibly compelling and beautiful and weird, and everything she touches is amazing.

lien citation
Danny Clinch

That was taken at the Tibetan Freedom Concert. I’m a huge fan of her music and of her personally. I remember her publicist or her manager coming over to me and saying, "OK, we’re going to bring Bjork by, and she really doesn’t have a lot of time to do this, but we wanted to do this." She’s just so intense ; she’s just so present that she just looked into the camera — talk about just a simple photograph that works. Her presence is so strong, you can just stare into her eyes for a long time and not get bored, even though the picture is so simple. I think I shot half a roll of film and a couple of Polaroids, and she walked away. That’s what I remember about that, it was just a couple of frames, and when I got my film back I just thought, "That’s beautiful, she’s beautiful."

lien citation
Daughtry

(American Rock Band)

Genius ! Bjork is in a category all to herself. This song (Joga) has her trademark blend of lush strings and eletronics. Bjork has a voice like nobody else. Like a siren. Her vocal range is sick ! She’s very theatrical,very animated... and she is a character for sure !

lien citation
Deep Dish

Different is good , and she does "different" better then anyone else.

lien citation
Derek Birkett

These were not the type of people who say : "Leave your kids at home when you tour.’"

lien citation
Derek Birkett

(Member of Flux Of Pink Indians (now Flux), associates of anarcho-punk collective Crass. Through Crass met Einar of Purkurr Pillnikk who later joined Kukl alongside Bjork. They recorded for Crass’ label, when half of Kukl became The Sugarcubes, Birkett became involved with them through his label, One Little Indian. He is now her manager.)

She’ll only work with people she respects... I was approached by four of the biggest selling artists in the world to sing with her at the Brits but she desperately wanted to sing with Polly Harvey. She’s done business deals on moral accounts, and paid people she didn’t have to, and credited people who didn’t need to be. She’s possibly the worst business person I’ve ever worked with.

We were going to do a major deal for The Sugarcubes with Warners. Just before the signing we were told there’d be an element of compromise and that if we went with the singles Warners wanted, they work harder. But the band said they’d be happier selling a hundred records they wanted to rather than one million that Warners did. I was devastated but they weren’t. Einar bought me a bottle of brandy and Bjork bought me a ceramic model where a snake pops out of a pot. And I was sitting in the park with them, thinking, Fuck, we just walked out on half a million quid and they don’t give a shit. It’s been a bit like that ever since...

lien citation
Dimitri from Paris

I had this first international artist to remix in the early 90’s which was from the lead singer of a band and started to have her first solo album, her name was Bjork. I really loved the Sugar Cubes of which she was the singer and I did this mix and handed it over to a couple of guest dj’s that went through Paris and that I had interviewed on my show namely like Frankie Knuckles and David Morales.6 months later I get a call from a Japanese guy living in New York saying ‘err.. can you get me a copy of that mix that you did’. I said how did you know about this ? ‘Well because David and Frankie are hammering it and are playing it about three times a night - every time that they play’.

lien citation
Dom T

When Dom met Björk he knew nothing about The Sugarcubes.

I just thought, who’s this wild and wonderful lcelandic girl. She’s like she is. She doesn’t put on a show for anybody. We went out and partied and got into the tunes everyone else was into. She’s always been into dance music, her taste in music is very, very wide, she’s into a lot of different styles.

 

She has always wanted to do her own album. Be in control and make her own music. I kind of realised that pretty quickly. I knew it was going to be a great album.

lien citation
Dorothée Berryman

interviewer : For your video selection, you’ve chosen björk. I found that a bit wierd. explain me why you’ve chosen her ?

dorotheé : Well, I first loved the movie Dancer In The Dark. I found it very moving and loved the musical parts, especially when she sings my favorite
things before the last scene. I adored it.

interviewer : Is it because as her she is an actress and singer that you like her ?

dorotheé : Not only because of that. She gives herself intirely when she sings. She
is complete on stage. I love her attitude.

lien citation
Dr. James Schmidt

Dear Friends at Bjork.com...

I was so happy today to read a quote of Bjork in Index Magazine concerning the
importance of pictures and visual stimuli when linked to music. She said
something to the effect of "most people’s eyes are much more developed than
their ears..."

This couldn’t be any further from the truth. I am a 29 year old professor of
piano at a music school in northern New York, and teach undergraduates in both
private and group piano environments. I am aware that most of us are extremely
sensitive to the visual happenings around us, and try to teach my students the
process of transferring what they see on the page (in black and white) into a
gesture on the instrument. This is very difficult however, because music in
both touch and sound is not as tangible to the human senses as it is when found
in print.

I am very happy that Bjork finds it necessary to appeal to the visual
capabilities of her fans in order to further express the emotion in her music.
Hopefully this process will encourage her fans (and my piano students) to become
more aware of their aural surroundings and ultimately realize the possibilities
of emotional depth through sound.

I attended her concert in New York City last October and became well aware of
her musical capabilities. I was simply mesmerized by her ability to display a
wealth of human feeling with the timbre and volume of her voice alone, not
including the wonderful choir, orchestra and electronica. I truly believe that
musicians of all disciplines can learn much from Bjork’s songs and vocal
techniques, and look forward to many more albums and concerts...

Sincerely,
Dr. James Schmidt
Crane School of Music
State University of New York at Potsdam
Potsdam, NY <

lien citation
Drew Daniel (Matmos)

With Björk, emotion is absolutely key. She’ll sacrifice a full orchestra if she thinks it’s clogging the mix.

lien citation
Einar Örn à propos de Björk

My impression of Björk is just Björk. I refuse to talk about my friends because a friendship is not for analysing. You’ll never get me to say I hate her because I regard her as one of my good friends. But I am glad that people have found something, this thing being Björk, after all these years, even though it has been staring them in the eye all this time. It’s incredibly funny that the music industry has suddenly gone, Wow, what a voice.

I think I must be devoid of emotions, or I am too familiar with all her capabilities, because I don’t piss in my pants when I hear her sing. I can only talk about her disability, which is to drive a car. In three words : well, well, well.

lien citation
Eisley

You all have toured with Coldplay, Switchfoot, Snow Patrol and New Found Glory among others. Who else would you all like to tour with ?

Weston : Mew, Bjork, Cashmere.

Sherri, Chauntelle : Cashmere.

Bjork could be fun

Sherri : Yeah, but she probably only picks really weird, unique artists.

Stacy, you recently were able to interview Stevie Nicks for Foam. What was that experience like ?

Stacy : It was amazing. She was so nice to me. She was like — just gave me a lot of insight, I think, and she was very funny — just really cool.

Are there any other artists that you all would like to interview ?

Garron DuPree : Paul McCartney.

Sherri : Bjork ! My husband got to interview Bjork on the phone a few years ago. I’m a little jealous.

lien citation
Empress of

I listened to Björk for the first time and I was like, "Nope ! I’m going to be the weirdest person I can possibly be", I’m going to be a rock star.

lien citation
Encyclopedia Pictura

How was it working with Bjork ?

Bjork is very tapped in. She assumed a position of support and generosity with us rather than a position of creative oversight. Her energy and focus were so strong that it pushed us to take this project on with a tremendous amount of mythological weight and tunnel vision enthusiasm.

What’s the basic concept of the video ?

Bjork is an archetypal nomad, shepherding giant yaks through the Mountains. She does hydromancy to decide whether to take them down a river or not. A second self, the Painbody Backpack, sprouts from her like a growth and then engages her in an action play which displays their relationship. The force which compelled Bjork to go down river begins to manifest itself in Bjork’s head and in the physical world. This character, the Rivergod, is a transcendental attractor which pulls her into the future.

How long did the video take to create ? What was the hardest aspect ?

The video took nine months from concept art to us being pulled - kicking and screaming - from our computers. Sean had to become a 3D expert and build a 3D camera system and playback box and pioneer lots of DIY processes. For me the hardest aspect was trying to achieve an immersive, complete, and very specific aesthetic - because the only thing in the video that isn’t hand crafted is bjork’s face, hands, and feet. I used my own hands everyday but also worked with over 50 key artists to achieve the forms and textures of this world. We tried to lodge ideas into the forms and use the patterns and textures of these forms to transmit meaning to the viewer.

What made you want to work with 3D in the age of YouTube ?

Well, firstly let me get out the news that 3D doesn’t work on YouTube because of heavy color compression, which is what anaglyph 3D glasses rely on for decoding the 3D properly. A lot of people watch 3D on YouTube without knowing that they are actually looking at something that is way screwed up, or ’ghosted’ in stereoscopic jargon. Secondly, why 3D ? Because we see the ultimate transcendental function of art as "expanding the realms of direct experience." 3D allows a film to be more like direct experience and less detached and seperate from how we organically percieve. Right now technology is still trying to create better home viewing solutions (anaglyph sucks), but theatrically its already there.

lien citation
Eumir Deodato

The work on Homogenic is actually simple. A lot of her rhythm loops are very contemporary, so before I attempted to write things on top of them I decided to write underneath, on her vocals, rather than to fight or add to the rhythm. Writing over the beat means writing a new line that’s not in the song, something that will stick out-a high violin part, for instance. But when you write a melody that’s already there, or chords in the low or mid range as pads, that’s writing under.

In some of the songs I followed her secondary vocal lines ; there was very little harmony and very few chords. I was doing that on ’Isobel’ too, where I wrote a natural C in a line that was in B minor. Much later on I learned that Björk is the type of singer who will sing the A sharp in A minor, but I wasn’t yet aware that she did that when I did that first song. It’s just something I felt about her.

Deodato’s old-fashioned pencil-on-paper approach blends nicely with the sample-churning techniques his younger colleagues embrace. Rather than diminish his contribution, both he and Björk feel that his traditional skills make him all the more valuable - and exotic - a commodity.

That’s where I shine, because all most people can do these days is program their drum machines and sequencers. They will take samples from television, which they have already heard from other movies ; that’s just rewriting, not writing. Sure I can sample but nothing ever beats the real thing.

He looks up to the cloudless sky, stretching his arms wide.

I’m here, Sitting in the sun, with beautiful mountains and this incredible view, in the company of Björk and all these musicians. I can’t sample that.

Then he looks our way and winks. But I can compose it.

lien citation
Eumir Deodato

"I was in Japan and she called me from a studio in Bahamas", recalls Eumir. They met couple of days later in London and the results can be heard in tracks Hyperballad, You’ve Been Flirting Again and Isobel.

"She has developed a style and a music that I’ve never heard anything like in my life. When I heard her material, I freaked out, and I said, ’What are you doing ? This is crazy, this is so difficult, to propose this kind of style to the people.’ But she does, and she’s successful at it. There’s the liberty she takes with melodies and with harmony that sometimes apparently leaves clashes that are not really clashes, they’re concepts. It’s an acoustic principle, but she instinctively goes into that vein, and she blends all these things with a beautiful voice."

lien citation
Evelyn Glennie

MY SPINE
’My Spine’ is from a group of pieces Bjork and myself wrote and experimented with during our initial meeting.I say ’experiment’ because that is exactly what we did
in my recording studio. Bjork was seduced by huge collection of percussion instruments and what did we decide to use ? Homemade tuned car exhaust pipes ! The
effect when played with four hand glockenspiel mallets portrays a raw, busy, gamelan-like sound which is in huge contrast to the sustain of Bjork’s voice. The title was derived simply from us liking the sound and feel of the words ’My Spine’.

OXYGEN
It is very difficult to explain the feeling when you meet someone for the first time and somehow magic happens. ’Oxygen’ was the first experiment Bjork and I made back in 1995. Everything we did we recorded ; this piece, with all the pops and rattles and other unrefined noises, shows that this was a totally spontaneous effort - without ’makeup’ or doctoring of any kind. This is how I like to make music. This piece remained untitled until appearing on this album. Why ’Oxygen’ ? I haven’t the foggiest.

Engineer and Producer Greg Malcangi adds :

Just a few hours after meeting for the first time, Evelyn and Bjork wanted to quickly lay down an idea while it was still fresh in their minds. A session tape was made within twenty minutes. At a later date, Bjork returned to Heritage studio to record a release version, but the magic of that practice take could never quite be recreated. Despite a few creaks and rattles from the marimba and the occasional ’pop’ from Bjork’s mic, both Evelyn and Bjork were in full agreement that the session tape should be used as the release version. It remains a completely unedited single take that is deeply moving.

lien citation
Fakesh (Funkstörung)

At the beginning, we never thought that vocals could sound that great on our music, but then we had the chance to do the Björk remix and her vocals sounded fantastic with our music.

lien citation
Foxy Brown

I’m a huge fan of Amy Winehouse and Bjork, she confesses about two of the people she hopes to work with for [her comeback].

lien citation
François Nemetä

( About the video for ’Isobel’ )

Isobel was filmed for two days in a forest near Llangollen, North Wales, plus one "long" day in Black Island Studios in London on May 31, 1995. The crew used a Mitchell S35 camera with a varispeed, "to be able to rewind the camera and do superimpositions/masks, as Melies used to do in the 1900’s." Film stock : Kodak 5231 (b&w)

Was it tough getting the projections to appear inside the water-organ ?

It was a complicated mirror-trick. The screen for the rear projections is huge and needs much distance, so we had to shoot in one of the biggest studios of London.

Who built the model planes & sets ?

An english model maker crew "Model Solutions" built the harmonium. [They] had just done some models for a Pink Floyd CD cover. The Art Dept (Joseph Bennett crew) brought the model planes, light bulb field, insects...

What was your role during production ?

Trying to get it done !

What do you remember about the shoot ?

rainy rainy rainy, muddy, slippery rocks by the river...
very tough. I think no one would understand what was all this about. especially for me who was walking with a crank (after a badly-broken leg) and michel was not quite sure of everything...

but he was not the only one : björk didn’t like her outfit after the first day of shoot, that’s why she finally wears two different oufits in the finished vid. Björk is such a nice person : as she could see everyone was working hard for her video, she would come on the shoot and stay even when she had nothing to shoot, just playing music (boards of canada) on her ghetto-blaster for the crew... so nice, so anti-star, so simple. And she would really involve in the creation process, watching, being interested in every shot we did and how we would make it.

The accomodations for Björk and Michel were planned in a very beautiful old hotel in Wales, but Björk came with her camping tent, put it in the garden of the hotel and preferred to sleep in it !

when the video turned out to be so good and beautiful, we had a projection of the finished video for the crew in a cinema in London. So it means that a 35mm positive copy was printed, unlike 99.9% of actual music videos.

lien citation
François Nemetä

( About the video for ’Bachelorette’ )

Filmed in 1997, a few weeks before Deadweight. There were 2 days of Bolex plus 3 days in a Los Angeles cinema studio on 35mm, plus 2 days in a French animation studio on a Debrie 35. They also shot in an L.A. train station, a park, and a few restaurants in downtown. The Chicago views are stock footage.

Fun fact : Nemetä kept a copy of the "My Story" book cover. Partizan founder Georges Bermann has the "big book" in his Paris office.

Compared to Jòga, this looks like it was a massive production, where both Björk, Michel and the entire crew worked extremely hard. Who worked the hardest ? .

ME of course ! and the whole crew as well. You’re right it was like a mini movie. a kind of mini nightmare, with all possible film techniques, and all the kinds of shooting (exterior shots with extras in black and white in the city / exterior colour, handheld camera in the forest (somewhere in a LA park) ; studio / crane shots with extras / many mini-sets / animation shots / post production on stock footage / 2nd unit shots...

the 1st AD impressed me. I don’t remember his name, he was an american guy, very good at his job. I thought "ok. I could never do that - I’ll stop being an AD soon" oh and the art department crew as well.

lien citation
François Nemetä

( About the video for ’Joga’ )

Jòga was filmed from 1-4 August 1997 in Iceland using a 6x6 camera, then scanned in high-resolution for post production. (Film stock : 400 rolls of Ektachrome 100 asa.) Michel shot Björk at the top of the hill with a Bolex ,but wasn’t happy with the outcome. "The film roll of the "bolex shots" wasn’t even transferred to video. As it was MY bolex, I kept the film roll - and transferred it later." Post production lasted about a month at BUF Compagnie.

Björk travelled with us (we were a very small crew in a minibus) and talked about places where she wanted to shoot.

How was the shoot ? Did anything go wrong ?

It was like holidays really, the days were like this : we were driving for an hour or two in a van, stopping at some point Björk knew or Michel saw, writing down where it was on a map to tell the helicopter pilot where it was and then keep scouting. Then the next day, they would sit in the chopper and fly off. They were taking pictures from up there, and that was it. They even tried from a small plane, but I think it was easier from the copter. we had extra fuel for the helicopter in our van.

basically it was pure holiday. The only hard thing was the weather. I remember that we were waiting for some clear weather to take-off in August and rain and grey weather... we were freezing cold. Summer in Iceland...

I remember clearly the scene on the black sand beach : Björk was doing her make up in the minivan, and then she would lie on the beach, and pretend to sleep. We were walking around her, taking pictures of her, and then take the copter to fly above her and shoot her from up there. But the cold waves were reaching her some time to time. And she was supposed to not move at all for about half an hour. and she didn’t. Truly this girl is an alien ! We were a small crew : Michel + photographer + his assistant + french producer + icelandic line producer, who was also driving us + myself. Plus Björk of course.

lien citation
François Nemetä

( About the video for ’Hyperballad’ )

Nemetä said in an e-mail interview in 2006 that Hyperballad was filmed in a studio in London on 35mm. "only one box of film of course. it’s one of the cheapest films Michel has done." .

"a long long shoot (approx 22 hours) on a day in December. I remember pushing the door to watch outside and seeing that it was night and that it had snowed during the shoot..."

Was this a hellish video to make ?

YES ! especially for the D.O.P : Tim Maurice Jones. For him it was a nightmare in measuring the lights on TVs, small light bulbs etc... PLUS doing all that in film superimposition : in total there was 8 layers superimposed.

AND for the operators. Each camera move = 1 instruction, as it was a one sequence shot [that] was 4 minutes long.... but as it was in animation, with very small light bulbs, it had to be done with long exposures... so each sequence shot was 6 times longer ... 24 minutes. They spent hours filling their computer with instructions. their computer had never taken so much different instructions for a camera move.

I think no one really realizes how this video is technically a masterpiece !!!

Who made all of the different elements ?

all the computer animations were done by a graphist @ BUF I think, and they were all done before the shoot. (and then played on the TVs in front of the camera) Now I wonder.. : maybe it was even Olivier "Twist" Gondry who was working there at that time. ? don’t remember.

for all the art department & props , it was all done by Michel + pierre pell + eric valin + me !

What did you do during production ?

run everywhere, waking up the DOP (or Art Dept, or Björk) when they would fall asleep ! moving Tv’s and stuff, really everyone was doing a bit everything as the crew was very small. watching the computerized Field Recorder moving and by itself in the low-lit studio with big motor noises in the middle of the night above a sleepy Börk was a surrealistic experience. not at all like an usual shoot !

lien citation
Franny Fox

(R&B singer/songwriter married to Paul Fox. Wrote ’Don’t Look Any Further’, covered by The Kane Gang and M-People. Helped Björk with translations of lyrics.)

I love her lyrical approach. I don’t know exactly how she goes about it, but it’s very raw, emotional and honest, and says exactly what’s going on in her head. She did most of the work, she knew what she wanted to say, I made it flow better in English. It’s like a painting, how she feels about a certain situation and her perspective on it, which, if you know Björk, is only how she could see it, which is what makes it unique. She turns everything into a positive, for herself, and to grow from. I really like her, in case you couldn’t tell. She’s brilliant, life-loving and woman-child."

lien citation
French & Saunders impersonating her

Things like that always make me laugh. I was very honoured.

lien citation
Frida Björk Ingvarsdottir

She’s a child of nature but not naïve, even if she pretends to be, said Frida Björk Ingvarsdottir, a newspaper columnist, who is not related.

She’s rebellious. She can be obnoxious. But that’s a common trait in Icelandics. You should see us drunk. She’s a strong woman, and I find that very positive.

She’s not globalized, like Britney Spears or the Spice Girls, only interested in what sells. She’s stubborn, and she stays who she is.

lien citation
Gabriela Fridriksdóttir

We are from the same family. Our grandfathers are brothers. Our collaboration started in a kind of thinking out loud, over coffee. She would understand everything in a very visual way. She also liked how I understood what she was doing, so our collaboration to begin with was a mental kind of thing. Then we decided three years ago that we should work a little more together.

First we collaborated on Björk’s Family Tree and the Greatest Hits album with M/M. In November last year we shot a video together where we tried to make the perfect collaboration. We shot the video in a horse farm in Iceland. Now we’re editing the raw material. We shot a music video for one of her songs on the new album, Medulla and another for the tetralogia I’m working on for the Venice Biennale. It’s an experiment.

lien citation
Gary Barnacle

(Session saxophonist, played on ’Tidal Wave’, from The Sugarcubes’ ’Here Today, Tomorrow Next Week’ and ’Anchor Song’ from ’Debut’.)

She’s very much how she comes across onstage, a livewire character with lots of spontaneous ideas. On ’Tidal Wave’ she collaborated with this Icelandic avant garde arranger on the brass arrangement which we thought was in the wrong key because it sounded so odd, but when we played it back with the track, it sounded great. The band were an interesting bunch to work with — maybe it’s the months of darkness but they have an other-worldly feel to them. Björk’s quite elf like in a way.

lien citation
Goldie

She’s an amazing woman, she’s totally unique, she does what she believes in, she makes music from her heart and she does it well. We could cover the whole spectrum of the world with the music we make. Which is quite mad.

lien citation
Graham Massey

(Founder member of 808 State. Bjork recorded two tracks on their ’Ex:El’ LP, ’Ooops’ and ’Q-Mart’. Is currently collaborating with Bjork on a new EP, due out in late autumn.)

She rang up out of the blue. She didn’t say who she was : ’a composer from Iceland’ is the way she put it, although I had an idea. She was listening to our ’90’ album and was looking for help on the drum programming side. I phoned that night to see if she’d do something for our album. She postponed her flight to Iceland, came up to Manchester the next day, and did two tracks in as many days. It was definitely a case of musical empathy.

Björk in two words ? Strength and timebomb, especially now she’s in the mainstream. Her background has an anarchic streak, and it hasn’t died out yet. It is in a position to kick off, which is one of the most interesting things in pop. I think she’s completely misunderstood : people think she’s just being clever but there is a genuine integrity about her music. Maybe it was a bit glossed over on the album, but look at what happens next. She won’t go for the easy option.

lien citation
Graham Massey

Most acts were putting out seven-inches with throwaway lyrics like, ’Ooh, baby, baby’. But Björk took that culture and made an album with poetic lyrics. It blew everyone away. She never tried to fit in with any electronic movement, she just took the ideas and got personal with it.

lien citation
Gudmundur Steingrimsson

(Drummer on Björk’s Icelandic jazz/swing LP ’Gling Glo’, on Bad Taste in 1990. After playing for nearly 50 years, is nicknamed ’Papa Jazz’. Plays in the Bjorn Thoroddsen Trio.)

We met on a radio programme, translated as Good Friends Meeting. I’ve listened to her since she was very young, I was born in 1929, and I immediately thought, This is different. She was unique. People disliked her because she was such a ... nature child. They said she was pretending but there is no pollution there, just pure Björk. I hope she is still the same.

She wanted to sing these old Icelandic tunes that older singers had made famous. The pianist, bassist and I want wild, we did the whole thing live, no double takes. The song she sings with just the piano in just one take. She is as good as the old singers, but very different. She changed the musical style, with more improvisation. She made it lighter. I’m very fond of her records in England, they’re so different. Even at my age, you can tell what she does and how she sings is from the heart, and that’s what counts.

lien citation
Gulli Ottarson


(Aka Godkrist, guitarist, collaborator of Psychic TV, Current 93, founder of Peyr and founder member of Kukl. Co-wrote an LP with Björk before the ’Cubes : from which ’Stigdu Mig’ appears on the B-side of ’Venus As A Boy’ and ’Sidasta Eg’ on the B-side of ’Big Time Sensuality’.)

I remember in the middle of the ’80s, an outdoor festival with a lot of drunk people calling out for her to play a new pop song, or a greatest hit, or a dance song. She was very proud just to play her own music, so to make her statement she jumped offstage, went to the centre of the dancefloor, and went to the toilet on the spot. It demonstrates that she speaks out very frankly.

lien citation
Guy Garvey (Elbow)

I’d love to work with Björk, just because ’Vespertine’ blew my mind. Just one of the most innovative things I’ve ever heard.

lien citation
Guðmundur Steingrímsson

Elle voulait reprendre de vieux standards. Nous nous sommes rencontrés au cours d’une émission de radio. Nous avons tout enregistré live. C’est vraiment une chanteuse extraordinaire, très douée pour l’improvisation. sa façon de chanter vient du fond de son cœur. Et c’est tout ce qui compte.

lien citation
Gwen Stefani

She has such a creative look. Her vocal style is so unique, she’s like a little alien. You know, a little tootsie-roll alien girl.

lien citation
Hildur Runa Hauksdóttir

When I first heard her album I was so surprised, says her mother whom I meet fleetingly in Reykjavik. Because for anyone who knows Björk, it is so very much her. It is a bit to do with being here, to do with the light and dark, the dramatic contrasts. It is very honest and I love to listen to it.

lien citation
HK119

The thought of her work ever turning into anything like an actual pop career hadn’t even crossed her mind until catching the attention of a friend of a rather influential friend.

“I think because of the strength of the videos combined with the music, a mutual friend showed them to Leila [Arab] who then showed them to Björk. Björk then picked me as her favourite artist of 2005 in Q magazine, which was really nice of her. Her label boss then asked her, ‘What’s this HK119, is it one of your things ?’, and she just said ‘no, it’s this Scandinavian bird !’. And then I just got an email from him saying he wanted to help me put my stuff out. No one else would have touched me with a pole, and then I get an invite like that !“

lien citation
Holly Herdnon

Au sujet du sexisme dans l’industrie musicale.
"I really appreciate the bjork comments. We are burdened by archetypes developed by an industry that wasn’t built for us."

lien citation
Howie B.

She has an amazing ability to express herself with her voice, while
also using a distinctive melody. When someone can express
themselves with that dexterity, which sounds funny because it’s how you
talk about hands... but her music moves me and Bono does the same
thing with his voice. Robbie (Robertson) can do that
to me. Few singers can do it, though.

lien citation
Hussein Chalayan

What’s different about Björk’s approach is that her ideas in the early nineties were touching on things that most musicians hadn’t touched on before. She made references to things that weren’t related to fashion or music — like nature and poetry and technology — that she kind of introduced through fashion and music.

lien citation
Inez+Vinoodh à propos de Björk

La femme professionnelle et la femme privée ne font qu’un. Elle manifeste en toute chose un engagement et une confiance à toute épreuve. Les idées, chez elle, lors de la préparation d’un clip, sont généralement visuelles mais sans qu’il n’y ait jamais une référence directe à l’objet. Björk pourrait tout aussi bien, par exemple, évoquer la mue d’une araignée comme référence au rugissement du lion.

lien citation
Inez+Vinoodh à propos de Björk

Une fois, par - 10 degrés en Islande, alors que nous faisions des repérages, elle sautait de la voiture en pantoufles et robe longue, et nous encourageait à nous élancer à ses côtés sur des cascades gelées et des sols glissants. Elle est originale et curieuse de tout. Son travail ne tend qu’à une chose : aborder des terres créatrices à chaque fois nouvelles. C’est la personne la plus talentueuse que nous ayons jamais rencontrée.

lien citation
Jack Perron

The work I did for Bjork clearly were « adaptations » : she had created full, complete arrangements written with music box in mind. Her music was inventive and beautiful as it lay, and it was a shame that it wouldn’t fit on a music box disc as it was. (Frosti was longer than the 1 minute which could fit on a disc.) So, I knew my task was to get it to fit without wrecking it.

lien citation
Jacob Magnusson

(Icelandic cultural attache in London.)

When she was in The Sugarcubes and had a baby, the band were promoting a concert and making their first appearance at it. Björk was walking around with her baby in a pram, handing out posters. I remember meeting her in a shop in the queue, and when it was her turn she said, I want to change this bottle of shampoo. The man asked her what kind of shampoo she wanted and she said, A bottle of milk for my baby. It shows how tough it was being a progressive musician in Iceland. But she was daring to be different.

lien citation
Jake (Scissor Sisters)

Can someone tell Bjork to give us more than ONE pop song on her new
album. . . bless her. Saw her at Radio City a couple weeks ago and it
was really good. . .throw us a bone though. Earth Intruders IS an
amazing song however. We tried covering it for the B-side of Kiss
You Off. We rehearsed and rehearsed and recorded it at a sound check
in Madrid. We took it back in the studio and tried to make
tails of it, and decided that it just didn’t sound good at all and we
weren’t going to subject you lovely people to our terrible version.
So instead we dug up a weird demo called Bad Shit from early Ta-dah
sessions. It’s a silly, simple tune.

lien citation
James Merry à propos de son travail avec Björk

How does this project compare to your previous work for Björk ?
I’ve been working with Björk for eight and a half years now and it’s safe to say no two days have ever been the same. Each project is so different from the one before. On Biophilia we went deep into scientific research for two years, app building and education. On Vulnicura we had the whole journey into virtual reality. Utopia is pushing off into a new trajectory.

lien citation
James Merry Merry à propos de Björk

Collaborating with her is “like an invitation into a very specific universe that she is creating to surround her music, where she encourages you to grow and flourish inside of that world and brings the best out of you, teasing out the places where both your worlds overlap while still staying true to her vision,” he says.

lien citation
James Merry Merry à propos de Björk

How did your partnership with Björk come to be ?
I was introduced to Björk over 6 years ago through a mutual friend in London when she was just starting to conceive Biophilia and looking for an assistant to come on board. It was such an adventure. We swapped a few YouTube videos by email and then I went to meet her in New York. I went back to London, and then two weeks later, I dropped everything and moved out to New York to work with her full-time, which I’ve been doing ever since. I’ve always been a bit reluctant to talk about it really, as it has always existed in such a magical and fertile place and I would never want to burst that bubble by trying to define it too much. But meeting and working with her has definitely been the best thing that ever happened to me, in so many ways.

lien citation
James Merry Merry à propos de sa rencontre avec Björk

J’ai rencontré Björk pour la première fois en 2009. C’est un ami commun à Londres qui nous a présentés, quand elle cherchait un assistant pendant les premières phases de recherche de son projet Biophilia Educational Project. Je suis à ses côtés depuis tout ce temps.

lien citation
James Merry Merry à propos de son travail avec Björk

Nous nous lançons toujours ensemble dans ces aventures – qu’il s’agisse d’une tournée, d’un photoshoot, d’un nouvel album, ou simplement de la découverte d’un nouvel auteur. J’adore être avec elle dans cette énergie obsessive d’exploration, où il y a toujours une nouveauté fascinante à partager. Elle a la capacité de créer autour de son travail un espace vraiment généreux et ouvert. Elle a aussi un esprit pratique et rigoureux. La caricature complètement à l’ouest qu’on fait d’elle me paraît toujours étrange, car dans n’importe quel groupe, c’est généralement elle la plus solide et la plus pragmatique.

lien citation
Janelle Monáe

I feel so blessed. I have so many people I look up too : Bjork, Outkast, Fiona Apple, Janet Jackson, Madonna... I want to take the things they’ve taught me to the stars...

lien citation
Jared Leto

She has such a unique voice and a unique point of view as an artist, and I really appreciate that.

lien citation
Jared Leto

Bjork is an amazing artist. She has one of the most purest voices ever.

lien citation
Jason Lee

It’s [Vespertine] very simply a perfect album from start to finish, and one that somehow makes me envious. I mean, how can one be that good.

lien citation
Jean Baptiste Mondino

(French photographer, responsible for the cover of ’Debut’ and the ’Violently Happy’ video.)

The last experience we had together was in LA. We were supposed to do the video for ’Violently Happy’ the morning of the earthquake, so we postponed it until the next day. She said she was so happy to have experienced the earthquake, and on top of that she didn’t have her son with her so she was freer to experience it without fear... For me she is an iceberg, we only see a little tip of it.

lien citation
Jean-Baptiste Mondino à propos de Björk

« La première impression que j’ai eue d’elle ­et qui dure ­, c’est qu’elle est un mélange de maturité et d’enfantin. D’entrée, quand elle est venue à Paris faire les photos de Debut, elle avait envie de mettre des vêtements de Marghiella. C’est un petit détail, mais un détail photographique de stylisme, qui montre qu’elle est curieuse, qu’elle a le sens des choses créatives du moment. Il y avait autour d’elle cette espèce d’étrangeté intense et qui, par moments, frise la schizophrénie.

Ça a été important pour moi de rencontrer une sensibilité que je ne connaissais pas. Elle est inclassable, extrêmement brillante. À travers sa musique, son physique et son comportement, on ne peut pas dire qu’elle découle de quelqu’un, on ne lui connaît pas d’ascendance, on a du mal à dire d’où elle vient. Ça a été assez étonnant de voir naître quelque chose qui n’avait aucune texture rétro. Notre relation de travail n’a pas été la même qu’avec les autres artistes : chacun a sa manière d’être. Et elle, il est évident qu’elle est très libre.

Ce qui est étonnant avec Björk, c’est qu’elle arrive toujours comme un personnage, elle débarque toujours comme dans un conte. Elle arrive avec sa petite valise à roulettes, avec des choses entassées dedans, un peu chiffonnées, et c’est toujours merveilleux : c’est une boîte à malice.

Lorsque j’étais à Los Angeles pour faire le clip de Violently Happy, il y a eu le fameux tremblement de terre de 94, très violent, le matin où on devait faire le clip. Évidemment, personne n’est allé au studio puisque les routes étaient cassées, il n’y avait plus d’électricité. La seule personne qui est allée au studio avec sa petite roulotte, c’était elle. Elle a trouvé ça « great » ! Quel personnage ! Elle aurait pu être dans Shrek.

Les relations de travail avec elle sont à la fois très simples et tordues. On a l’impression d’avoir affaire à quelqu’un qui vient d’une autre planète. Même si on communique par la langue anglaise, par sa voix, la manière dont elle se meut devant l’appareil, on a toujours l’impression qu’on est avec quelque chose dont on ne connaît pas tout à fait les codes.

C’est difficile d’entrer dans son univers. On est extrêmement curieux parce qu’on a l’impression qu’elle nous laisse un peu à sa porte. On sent que c’est tellement brillant et intelligent que ça nous fascine, mais on est un petit peu à la bourre derrière elle.

Je suppose qu’elle touche à quelque chose d’extrêmement féminin. Peut-être qu’elle est l’artiste musicale femme qui nous emmène le plus près de l’idée d’extase, de schizophrénie de la femme. Ça frise le mystique sans être mystique. Avec elle, je ne sais jamais à qui j’ai affaire. Elle est tellement double, elle est enfant et elle est très vieille aussi. C’est comme une vieille âme, mais en enfant. Même les vêtements, tout ça... On peut très difficilement s’habiller comme elle, on ne voit pas beaucoup de clones de Björk.

Elle est dans un truc barré, elle est barrée. Quelquefois, je suis gêné d’être indécent, de voir quelque chose et de ne pouvoir y arriver moi-même. À la fin d’une séance avec Björk, il y a toujours une frustration finalement. Une frustration très agréable. Mon travail avec Björk n’avait rien à voir avec les représentations esthétiques que j’avais eues jusque-là, quand je portais à l’écran ou en photo des femmes chez qui, souvent, la sexualité dominait. Chez Björk, la sexualité existe mais elle ne s’exprime pas comme ça. Certaines ont l’impudeur de se déshabiller, de se mettre à poil, de faire des choses provocantes, elle a l’impudeur et la provocation de nous montrer quelque chose d’intime mais autre. En même temps, on a envie d’avoir une attitude extrêmement polie vis-à-vis d’elle. J’ai des photos à effet, où elle est un peu plus grimaçante, que je n’utiliserai jamais. À l’arrivée, il doit y avoir une beauté, un côté merveilleux. Comme sa musique : tordue mais belle. »

lien citation
John Kricfalusi

Most bands try to imitate others. But Björk is as original as Elvis - and she’s got a cuter groin thrust’.

lien citation
John Kricfalusi

( Directed the ’I Miss You’ video )

Bjork was a fan of Ren & Stimpy, and I read about that and I saw her in concert buying a t-shirt . She was coming to LA to play at the Palace. So I called her manager and asked if she’d get me tickets and she got me a backstage pass. And after the show I went back and met her, we were sitting around, starring at each other and we were both a little bit shy about it. And then I picked up another flyer from another rock concert, turned it over and drew picture of Bjork dancing with Jimmy the idiot boy. She started to giggle and I said ; "You wanna make a video ?" and she said ; "ok".

lien citation
John Tavener

I had whatsername ? Bjork. Bjork round to dinner the other night, and I want to write something for her. I don’t see why not. She’s far more intelligent than most classical singers.

lien citation
John Tavener

I’d heard her voice... it was quite a raw, primordial sound, and I was very attracted to this sound. I thought of the ejaculatory prayer called the "Jesus Prayer" – "Lord Jesus, have mercy on me" – and I set it in three languages : in Coptic, in English, and in Greek. I thought the way she sang it was quite wonderful, and it couldn’t possibly be sung by anybody else but her, or someone with a voice very, very similar to hers. It had nothing of a western-trained voice about it. In fact, it wasn’t trained at all, and this is why I liked it so much, because... it had a savage quality, an untamed quality. These are qualities that I like... I liked the simplicity of her, I liked the spontaneity of her, and I liked the result that came forth in Prayer of the Heart.

lien citation
John Waters

Stylists have ruined everything. Nobody wants to be Björk. I love Björk. We need Björk.

lien citation
Jon Fugler


(Vocalist of London-based dance progressives Fluke. Remixers of ’Big Time Sensuality’ and ’Violently Happy’.)

I think she liked our treatments because of the chunkiness of them, but I could be completely wrong. We didn’t talk about the music when we met, but how shit Iceland is, and London is, and how difficult it is to find good schools for your kids. She’s more concerned about her son’s school than all the crap with being in a band. You can see that she is a professional, that she ’switches on’ and does her show, but you get the feeling she is really sound. You couldn’t keep that image up anyway : she’d end up blasting her head off with a harpoon. In three words : beserk little Eskimo.

lien citation
Joni Mitchell

She has genuine sexual abandon, whereas a lot of sex symbols are actually frigid.

lien citation
Jónsi (Sigur Rós)

What impact did Björk have on you growing up ?

She was always really weird, pregnant, dancing around, really strange. (laughs)

lien citation
Josh Groban

Mostly I listen to rock music. I downloaded the new Bjork album, which is really, really interesting stuff.

lien citation
Justin Robertson

(Remixed The Sugarcubes’ ’Birthday’ and ’Motorcrash’, and ’Big Time Sensuality’.)

I used to run a club in Manchester called Most Excellent, and had seen her dancing about in the club. She used to come down with Graham Massey and 808 State. I remember once she had the crowd captivated : she went into this strange girlish skip around the club with a rucksack on her back. There was lots of gawping and general amazement. She’s inspiring, frightening, amusing.

lien citation
Kate Garner

I’ve photographed her six or seven times, and this picture was for an American magazine [photo of Björk underwater]. It was a funny shoot because I’m a little scared of water, but I managed to go under without an aqualung. Björk’s very playful and will do whatever you ask. She spent the whole morning underwater, wearing different clothes, and she didn’t complain once. She was very sweet to me because I was so frightened.

lien citation
Keira Knightley

I don’t think I’m confident enough yet to be used to being in the limelight because of my style. But I loved the swan dress Bjork wore to the 2001 Oscars. I’d love to have the courage to do the same.

lien citation
Kelela

Have you seen any live shows lately that inspired you on that front ?
I feel some type of way about being like, I just saw Björk and it was really inspiring, but … it’s true ! I saw her a few months ago, and I saw how she approached that. And it was really impressive, and it was also really … touching. I feel like I just want my emotions to be at the forefront of my performance, and if anything distracts from that, I’m in trouble. What blew me away was how still her performance was. And also, there are times when I’m onstage when I just want to sing, and a lot of my body movements are just weird. It’s decidedly not-for-you. It’s not cute. I’m just singing, I’m going off. And there’s times when I really want to go … even more off. And Björk gave me permission to do that as much as I fucking want to.

Have you ever met her ?
Yeah, she’s come to a couple of the shows. About a year ago she came to Rough Trade and I met her before the show. It was really cool. She’s somebody that I feel awkwardly comfortable with. It’s like I’m out of my body and looking at myself and being like, “How are you acting so fucking normal right now ?” [Laughs.]

She’s also so inspiring in just learning how to be in the world. Like, how are you so mysterious and elusive but also so relatable ? How can you cultivate this mysteriousness without feeling cold ? That’s the intersection I’m always interested in. I am your homegirl, at the end of the day, but I also feel very … outside. So if you’re finding solace in feeling outside with me, then we’re good to go.

lien citation
Kelis

We were doing a show called Fashion Rocks in London last year, and our dressing rooms were right next to each other. Björk had a Peaches CD that was skipping, and I gave her my copy of the CD. So we started talking and we hung out after the show. We exchanged numbers, and later on she contacted me about singing on a track. I’ve always really liked her stuff, so I said, ’Yeah.’

lien citation
Kelly Lee Owens

Quand je me suis rendue en Islande, j’ai mieux compris la musique de Björk. On conduisait à travers le pays, avec ces grands espaces, ces montagnes... Ça a fait sens pour moi, tout ce drame musical. Tu peux monter en haut d’une colline et te mettre à chanter aussi fort que tu veux, ou être silencieux. Je suis très inspirée par les paysages, l’environnement. La musique peut être pluvieuse, par exemple. Je cherche une certaine pureté, l’honnêteté, virer toutes les merdes qui peuvent m’entourer. »

lien citation
Kent Nagano

When Kent Nagano convinced Björk to tackle the speaking part of Arnold Schoenberg’s 1912 atonal masterpiece Pierrot Lunaire, he was bridging cultural divides with customary cool. The most exciting conductor of his generation and the most idiosyncratic vocalist of hers, exploring the thorniest composer of the 20th century ? The Icelandic electro-songbird was anxious over the classical music world’s perceived arrogance, but Nagano told her that Schoenberg wrote the piece because "he’d had it with the snobs in Germany," she recalled recently. "They’d become so self-obsessed and the gap between educated music people and the common people had become massive."

So the titan of 12-tone music wrote Pierrot for "more of a street person." Björk could relate, and Nagano insisted she experiment. "I do strongly believe in chemistry, which of course is an inexplicable human phenomenon," he said last week, adding that Schoenberg was one of Björk’s favourite composers as a classically-trained child, pre-Sugarcubes. "She’s at ease reading the music and her very imaginative and intense creative skills combined for a working environment that was deeply inspiring."

Great repertoire will impart different meanings at various stages of the listener’s life. But the fear of the unfamiliar, or of instrumental music in general, keeps some from taking the plunge. There’s also the snob factor that initially intimidated Björk. Says Nagano : "I totally sympathize with that nearly overwhelming, fragile feeling of thinking you’re not quite understanding things that everybody else appears to be getting."

By comparison, Nagano confesses it was only relatively recently that he began to appreciate the subtleties of wine, strange for a cultured Californian. "Everyone who attends a concert goes to discover something that is unknown, and that shared sense of discovery is what makes live music so extraordinary. If you go with an open mind, the opportunity for discovery and tremendous emotional reaction can be more invigorating than you could possibly imagine. It’s the opposite of cynicism."

lien citation
Lars von Trier

I was completely fascinated by her and screamed right out that this person just has to be a filmstar. And then I will perhaps be able to boast about the fact that I was the one lighting that star.

lien citation
Lars von Trier

"I’ve Seen It All" is one of the two songs I’ve written the lyrics for, Lars confesses. The rest of them are written by Björk. I don’t think she was too thrilled by my attempts at a writer. But she is still loyal enough to perform them.

lien citation
Lars von Trier

I like her more than she thinks I do and I hope she likes me more than I think she does.

lien citation
Lars von Trier

I wrote "I’ve Seen It All". Björk wrote the rest of the soundtrack. I suppose she wasn’t especially enamoured at my attempts to be a lyricist, but she’s been loyal enough to perform them

lien citation
Lars von Trier

It has been terrible. But the results are incredible. Björk is not an actor. She is not acting in this film but feeling everything, which is extremely hard on her and on everyone else, too. It was like being with a dying person.

lien citation
Laura Levine

’I’m often asked if I have a favorite photo and I can say without hesitation that it’s this one right here. All of the elements combined to make it one of my favorite moments as a photographer, and it happened purely by chance. I met Bjork the night before when she invited herself along and joined some friends and me for a late night pool game up in Woodstock. At the time she was upstate recording with the Sugarcubes. I was already a fan, and had always wanted to photograph her, and when I asked her if I could she said sure. Just like that. We’d been talking all night, she trusted me, and I guess that was all she needed to go on.

The next day I picked her up and brought her to my friend Ben’s house, who helped out as my assistant for the shoot. I knew he had a lovely forest glade behind his house and I thought the setting fit in nicely with her free spiritedness. As happens often in shoots I’ve done (don’t ask me why), she gradually began to to shed her clothes. I picked out a couple of oversized leaves (a la Eve in the Garden of Eden) and she stepped onto a large boulder. At that moment it started to drizzle, she stood on tippy-toe and opened her mouth to catch a raindrop on her tongue. Click.

Having spent a long time talking with her the night before I felt this image really captured her essence - a woodland sprite, a free spirit, playful, earthy, and open . (Some other reasons why this is a favorite ? No makeup artists, no stylists, no trendy fashions, no managers, no publicists, no record label politics, no artificial lighting, no gimmicks, no self-consciousness. Just natural light, some foliage, and Björk.)’

lien citation
Laura Levine


Bjork and I had a blast collaborating on these photo-illustrations, back when I was a photographer and slowly moving over to painting and illustration. These were done well before the days of Photoshop.

With the help of some wonderful stylists and hair and make-up people, she and her Sugarcubes bandmate Siggi were transformed into some of my favorite fairy tale, nursery rhyme and fictional characters. I then posed them in front of a white backdrop, photographed them, made color xeroxes of the shots I liked, and then painted the backgrounds directly onto the color xeroxes. Seems so primitive now !

lien citation
Leila Arab

At college she became a DJ and something of a regular on the London party scene, and in the early ‘90s was a patron of the city’s jazz clubs. Here she encountered the Brand New Heavies, who later recommended her to Björk. The Icelander was putting together the touring band for Debut and on the hunt for a female keyboardist who could sing, and Leila fit the bill. Soon after she was playing live on stage to a sold out Wembley Arena for what was only Björk’s second ever solo gig.

Invited back for the Post world tour in 1995, Leila put her foot down about doing any kind of backing vocals this time. “It was a bit like Tom Waits duetting with Mariah Carey,“ she laughs. “She sings so high, it was like torture for me.“ Björk’s first and last comparison to Mariah Carey aside, Leila was appeased by being put in front of a mixing desk for the very first time, giving her ultimate control over everything the audience heard. After baffling a few technicians with her naivety for the desk at first (“They’d say stuff like, ‘and if you press this button, you can hear that channel through the headphones.’ And I’d be like ‘Noooooo way !’ They thought I was taking the piss !“) this new tour duty would form the basis of her future career and sound.

lien citation
Lily Allen

I would choose Bjork singing ’It’s oh so quiet’, just because I think she’s a crazy woman and I really like her music and she’s one of my influences and inspirations. This is one of my favorite song by her.

lien citation
Liz Naylor

(Press officer for Blast First and then One Little Indian before starting the Catcall label. All-round Riot Grrrl/Queercore agent provocateur.)

My abiding memories of her are being in a strip club in Lisbon, about five in the morning, Björk just being an animal, drunk and dancing lasciviously on the dancefloor. She’s a sex animal and she knows it.

The press have written about her as this fragile, mysterious, waif-like creature but in fact, she’s incredibly down to earth - she has to be to bring up a kid. The picture in Q where she is waving her fist towards the camera, that’s much more like her than any other picture. Just a bit of a boot boy, really. She’s also got one of the dirtiest laughs I’ve ever heard. She’s an incorrigible flirt, with everybody, on whatever level, which is what people find charming about her, but she also doesn’t suffer fools gladly. She’d tell journalists who wanted to always interview her, Fuck off, talk to some of the others. Björk ultimately wants her own way. She could be a complete pain in the arse - you’d tell her there was a photo session in Paris and she’d go off shopping...

lien citation
Lynnfox

(About the video for ’It’s In Our Hands’)

In terms of storyline, Björk herself came up with a lot of ideas for the projections. She sent the team a pile of books about inuit people. "It was specificaly about seals, and their role in the lives of the Eskimos, but it also went into detail about their whole culture, their lives and their stories... Her music has a very Northern, Arctic feel about it. I think she wanted that to come through the film.

The end result is a crudely animated piece, a rough collage of Inuit, wild animals, and arctic scenery over which, in child-like scrawl, the three have scratched sharp fangs, scibbled lines and erectd penises ; it’s a far cry from the initially complex piece Lynn Fox orignially envisioned for her . "We finally got to the root of Björk’s vision for the film when we went out to Iceland to see her. She had a pile of photocopies of these inuit pictures and some black marker pens, and she started scrawling all over the pictures. Then she showed it to us saying "look, this is what I was talking about, this is how easy it is. Just animate this in the shittiest way you possibly can".

You can imagine us on the end of the telephone, trying to get our head round her ideas ? She’s saying : you know when you get those old sepia photographs of Inuit people... well I’d like you to get something like that, but then I want you to draw lots of erected penises and moustache all over them. We’re on the other side of the phone thinking... But this is the way Björk works, she has an idea or a sense of what she wants and then she’ll tell it to you, sort of give you a little start and then you’re away.

lien citation
Lynnfox

(About the video for ’Desired Contellation’)

For Desired Constellation, Björk told them about an idea she’d had where her hands were able to grab the stars, roll them like dice, and toss them into new constellations ."We thought that was a very strong image to work with, but we weren’t too sure about just having these god-like hands... It always ended up beign a bit Michelangelo. We thought we could make it more playful, so we went back to her with the idea of making these hands into the tails of schools of sea creatures.

We took photographs of seals swimming through the sea, and then we chopped them up and photographed a couple of hands, and collaged them in, so you ended up with these kind of weird beings. You don’t really know wether they’re arms or seals, bit of hands or underarm or whatever.

lien citation
Lynnfox

(About the video for ’Unravel’)

For the track "Unravel", the idea came again from Björk . "The song is so beautiful, I think she always wanted to make a video for it, but it never got picked as a single. She always had this idea though, where she and the devil are in two rocking chairs sitting opposite each other and he is unraveling strings that come out of her heart.

Again, Lynn Fox added their own slant to the film, preferring to focus on the strings and their motion as they drift from Björk to a representaion of the devil (dressed in a semblance of Björk garments). "The unraveling is the narrative. It’s not the debil nor her, it’s the process, this constant interplay of the heartstrings... So there’s this constant state of flux between her and the devil, all kind of rocking gently in time of the music".

In case you’re wondering who made Björks dress for this promo, it’s actually two friends of hers, fashion duo (and sisters) Aftur who hail from Iceland and made the dress from pieces of lace taken from hundreds of discarded bridesmaid dresses.

lien citation
Lynnfox

(About the video for ’Pluto’)

According to Lynn Fox, the biggest challenge in making the entire series of films was findng the right man to star in the film "Pluto", a bizarre, disturbing piece. It features the jerking, violent body movements of a naked, masturbating man, whose shaved head, at the momet of climax, explodes into a myriad of indistinguishable body parts. The film is based on a previous Lynn Fox project that was never made . "When we had the first meeting in Iceland to talk about the concert, we had images in our portfolio from that treatment." .Björk saw the images and immediatey said "we have to do this, I’ve got a song that’s perfect for it". We thought it was too complex, and we were very reluctant, but every conversation we had with her she was like "what about the masturbating film ?" and in the end we just gave in."

The boys suspect the line "Excuse me, I have to explode" may have influenced Björks enthusiasm to use the idea for the song, which is often played at the end of concerts, along with fireworks display. Finding the man with the right physique, gravity and performing ability proved, however, to be elusive. The afternoon before the shoot Lynn Fox still handn’t found thier man. So they asked Björk if she had any ideas. "and she said yes, I know just the guy . So she gets out her mobile phone and says "let me call him"... it turns out he’s like iceland most famous actor." Ingvar Sigurdsson , star of features such as "angels of the universe" was not only willing to strip and simulate masturbation for the film, but also agreed to shave his head especially for the part.

lien citation
M.I.A.

She has a weird energy about her as a woman. We were in this town to do a show and she spread such positive vibes. There were birds singing and rainbows – we could even see a tornado going on ! We could actually see it ! I think that every artist has an aura and persona that develops and Bjork spreads such a positive energy. You can just feel it.“ She recounts the part of the show where the Icelandic princess allowed her to get involved in the finale, clearly ecstatic at the trust the legendary songstress placed in her to play her instruments. “Now I wouldn’t even let myself play instruments ! But it was so good that she wasn’t afraid of me messing her show up. I suppose its something that you learn when you get older

lien citation
M/M (Paris)

Is the "Verspertine" CD package and video your first project for Björk ?

Our collaboration with her started in 1998, when she commissioned us together with photographers Inez Van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin for the sleeve of her compilation of videos, "Volumen". A year later she asked us again to think about her book project "Björk" as designers/editors, which is soon to be published by Little-I in the UK and Bloomsbury in the US. Then came the video, which was originally planned for a song from the "Dancer in the Dark" soundtrack. She was cherishing the project, but decided to postpone it a bit as she was writing new material she felt would fit even better with our initial ideas. It then became the video for "Hidden Place", the first single from "Vespertine". At the very end, she decided to ask the four of us to do the sleeve, as well.

How do you approach a project like this ?

Like any other project—same involvement, same interest. Our collaboration with her has been growing naturally and with mutual confidence over the years.

Did you deal with Björk directly or did art direction come from Elektra, the record label ?

Elektra is only the licensed label for the U.S. She commissions everything by herself, and is very instinctive... no control freak.

What was she like to work with ?

Genius, genuine, generous, and above all, trustful.

What was it like co-directing the video for "Hidden Place" ?

Spending four days in an empty, frozen 10,000 square foot studio shooting close-ups of a face and some liquids pouring over a mask was an unforgettable experience. Then spending days and days and days in some dark rooms looking at ever-changing-color-balance TV monitors in the back of an operator. Eating bad sandwiches, crisps and sushi.

Where did the idea come from to shoot the video for "Hidden Place" without any cuts ? Close-up shots panning around the face fit in very nicely with the theme of the song, as well.

We always wanted to get as close to her as we could, as we all felt she had never been portrayed as the "real" and beautiful woman she is. This is somehow taboo, to observe a pop star with no makeup from a distance of half an inch. Then the idea of the liquid works as a visualization of all possible emotions pulsating and circulating in her very busy brain. The loop idea was a main point for us as well, trying to extend the usual time frame of pop video super-fast editing, to make it hypnotising, mesmerising and irritating, like an eternally burning fireplace.

Did any good stories come out during the making of the project ?

She cooks good pasta with cream and caviar and sing-a-long Boney M tunes.

lien citation
M/M (Paris)

More recently you have worked with Björk, designing her CD package, her book and directing her video ? How do you see that partnership developing ?

We are currently working more with Björk. We tend to have a lot in common with the people we work with. We see graphic design as a conversation and we are always waiting for an answer. I think that it is important that the relationship develops until we realise that we’ve nothing to say to each other, and then to split amicably, without argument. At the moment it is a pleasure to work with Björk.

lien citation
M/M Paris

Dans notre travail avec Björk, il y a quelque chose de très charnel, de l’ordre de la mise à nu, raconte Mathias. C’est comme si nous faisions naître un Frankenstein à quatre mains avec elle. Les mots de chacun de ses personnages sont illustrés, et nous en dessinons le langage.

lien citation
Madonna

She’s incredibly brave and she’s got a real mischevious quality about her. I find her very compelling, really daring.

lien citation
Magga Stina

(A member of the now disbanded Reptile, who were signed to Bad Taste. The band had an EP on One Little Indian before releasing their only LP ’Fame & Fossils’ on Alternative Tentacles.)

We met when The Sugarcubes were beginning and have been friends since. We played in one band together, The Jazz Band Of Conrad B, which Bragi of The Sugarcubes started in 1990. There were 13 of us, all on instruments that we weren’t used to playing. Björk played clarinet. We were just having fun, with a big ’F’.

I met her in the swimming pool the other day - it was like a car crash between us. We never talk about music because there are so many other things to discuss, like how many times you swim from one side of the pool to the other. It’s hard to say how she has changed. For good and bad, maybe. Good, because I’m glad people are changing their musical tastes toward her kind of music. Bad because I’ve only seen here three times in a year. She is a total babe.

lien citation
Marcus Dravs

She wrote the song ’Joga’ for a friend of hers, and she explained that particular character to me. First of all, she set out an overall picture, like whether it’s a song of no compromise or whether it’s about a character who’s very enthusiastic and helpful ; she’d say we should do heartbeats or whatever.

I then came up with a rhythm that seemed to fit that description of a personality, and she said, ’Oh, the distortion is a bit too abstract ; it should be more punchy.’ We did other hits, maybe start again, but those first noises wouldn’t necessarily be thrown away. Then Mark had a go with it. He took 99 percent of what I did and came up with some noises, which gave me new ideas and I’d have another go.

lien citation
Margaret Cho

I went to see Björk two weeks ago, and I sat there for the whole show and cried — I mean hysterically, screaming and everything. It was the Hollywood show and I was in this balcony filled with celebrities — totally embarrassing.

lien citation
Margaret Cho

There are people nowadays that I’m just unglued by. I love Björk — her music and her style. There’s something about her that makes people go crazy. I went to see her in Los Angeles on her last tour for the Vespertine album, and the audience was like none other I had ever seen. They were seething with emotion, people were passing out and crying. It was interesting because the audience was made up of virtually the same people that come to my shows. They act completely differently, of course. I’m a big fan of so many people as well as being a performer. I think it’s really important as an artist to become very involved in other artists’ work.

lien citation
Margaret Cho

Of those who’ve come before, the most inspirational are ?

Probably Madonna, then Björk, Roseanne, Rosie O’Donnell – they’re all very inspiring. They are all very different from one another, too. But they’re alike in that they’re true trailblazers.

lien citation
Marius De Vries

The working title for a long time was Domestica. It was all to do with Björk wanting to make a record as a reaction to the wanderings and the pain she experienced making Dancer In The Dark, and how much that had taken out of her, to make a record about the place you come back to after you’ve wandered. The chamber-music dimensions and intimacy of Vespertine are all very much driven by that overriding aesthetic of being homely and comfortable.

Björk describes what she wants in terms of sounds in a language that to an observer might appear surreal or even nonsensical. But Björk and I have had a connection for a long time, and the people she chooses to work with are often selected with an eye on this. I remember from our very early sessions how she described a sound by saying ’You know when you get a tube of toothpaste and you squeeze it and you watch the toothpaste coming out the end of the tube ? You need to have it sounding more like that !’, and on another occasion she said ’Hold a pineapple in your hand and look at the fluffy bit at the top, well it needs to sound more like that !’ They tend to be very poetic descriptions of what she wants to hear, and you either get it or you don’t.

lien citation
Marius De Vries

Shortly after completing Moulin Rouge Marius was asked by Björk to help her finish her latest album, Vespertine. This was only the latest step in a working relationship which began when Marius was working on some remixes for the last Sugarcubes record.

"Back then, she was really the first artist who I connected with who provided a home for some of the odder and more outlandish aspects of what I do in terms of programming and sound design. She’s very au fait with contemporary avant garde music and the more pioneering electronic stuff. She’s always been very comfortable and enthusiastic about both, and it’s also a passion I share. To find someone who is making pop records but was prepared to accommodate such influences was very exciting for me, and I think it was great for her to find someone who was capable of turning out professional-sounding records and understood those languages. In many respects Vespertine pushed some of those elements even further because of the involvement of people like Matmos, Matthew Herbert, Thomas Knak and Zeena Parkins, who are all phenomenal musicians and composers in their own right.

Björk collaborated with numerous people on just about every continent. For example, the harpist Zeena Parkins was from New York, Matmos are based in San Francisco, Thomas Knak in Denmark, Bogdan Roszinski in Toronto, and Matthew Herbert and Guy Sigsworth are based in London, so Björk was travelling around with Jake Davies who was archiving and keeping the Pro Tools sessions organised. By the time I came to Vespertine Jake had many hard disks full of people’s contributions. All the parts needed a lot of sorting out and comping, and they all needed to be kind of introduced to each other. Most of what I did was to do with this kind of organisation and maybe add little bits here and there where I thought they were needed. Then there were a few new tracks such as ’Pagan Poetry’ and ’Palm Stroke’, which we more or less started from scratch.

Marius’ task of collating and arranging the Vespertine sessions was made particularly difficult by the different formats of the recordings.

"Any given song might have been spread across three or four Pro Tools recordings, some of which came from the early sessions in Spain when it was just Björk and Jake’s programming, a scratch vocal and maybe something from Guy if he was passing through. Harp sessions would have been recorded later in New York, in some cases as an overdub on top of a slave mixdown of that Spanish stuff. Then she would have posted it off to Matmos and asked them to add their stuff. Matmos are happy to work with a stereo track, so Jake would have sent an MP3 stereo backing track, Matmos would have worked their stuff on top of it and sent it back as consecutive DAT streams, with a sync pulse on the front of each track. Occasionally there would also be some additional programming Björk had done on her Powerbook. I took this weird collection of sessions and assembled them into one big Logic session and then put it together track by track."

"It was useful that I came in late because I could see the wood for the trees and I didn’t have an overly emotional attachment to any particular overdub. There were sacrifices that had to be made but I had to be very sympathetic to everyone’s contributions because these are all brilliant musicians and everything they do they do for a reason. Before attempting to mix and match it all together I examined each individual contribution and made sure I was being sensitive to what they were trying to do."

lien citation
Mark Bell

I really like working this kind of session. It’s more open-minded. You can sometimes get locked into things, like with these guitar groups who are so prejudiced, like you’ve got to study gui-tar for ten years before you can make a blues album. But with Björk, if it sounds good, it’s good.

She’ll go, ’Can you make the bass line more furry ?’... It’s always poetic, which is good, because if she tells you exactly what to do, you’re more like an engineer. This way, you get to create atmospheres too.

lien citation
Mark Bell

How did you meet Bjork, and how did you wind up working with her ?
Bjork rang me when she was in the Sugarcubes, to talk about doing something on ’Debut’ we met and really got on, but I just wasn’t ready to do anything like that, I was too busy breeding exotic monkeys...

What was different about working on Bjork’s "Selmasongs", which was obviously influenced by the movie "Dancer in the Dark" that it accompanies, as compared to "Homogenic" ?
With ’Selmasongs’ it was really fun, the narrative of the film dictated a direction, we took a different route and ended up with ’Selmasongs’ ... We had a tap dancing instructor wired up to trigger synths for our amusement ... we mixed it in Pro Tools 5.1 which is really confusing especially when you’ve got joysticks for panning, and you can’t stop playing with it...

What is the creative process producing tracks for Bjork ?
It’s different everytime sometimes it comes from a freeform session, a melody she hums to me, some basic chord structures or the text ... It’s always fun as she hasn’t any preconceptions about genre so we take it where ever it wants to go !

lien citation
Mark Bell

I really do think
she’s the best singer I’ve ever heard. Even live. She can sing it every single
time, and it’s just perfect. She really understands everything about
music.

lien citation
Mark Bell

How did the Björk collaboration come up ?

I met Björk when she was playing one of the last Sugarcubes concerts, she really wanted me to contribute to her solo album Debut but I was to busy fannying around with my own beats. She then rang up when she was doing Post but I was still fannying. Then she was doing her third Album and she asked if I’d come to Spain to work with her for a bit, I ended up staying for 5 months and then we did Homogenic.

Working with such an unconventional artist must have been a bit of a challenge. How did you work with her ?

It’s more fun than challenging, similar things move/excite us, it’s more of a team thing. I could do whatever with the music and she can sing over it straight away without hearing it once. We captured some beautiful moments like that. We worked with some brilliant musicians, like Coba, a classical Japanese accordian player. On Bacholorette he thought his part should sound like it was played by a really enthusiastic amateur, so he limited himself to three fingers on each hand so it would be a struggle for him to play, man v accordian, which was nice. Deodato the disco legend did most of the string arrangements with us ; his old 70’s album covers are a testament to his genius with his flowing locks and ladies in bikinis everywhere. Markus Dravs was brilliant to work with, he co-produced Brian Eno and he’s a crazy German Liverpudlian. Trevor Morais whose studio it was is a cool drummer who played with Kool & The Gang and loads of other great funk bands. On a morning he’d do a ‘drum school’ thing where Markus, Björk, Rebecca (lard) and me would learn the ways of funk !

How did you approach Dancer In The Dark, which probably had more constraints due to the nature of the project ?

The only constraints was the momentum and mood of the music to be locked to the film, which wasn’t that hard ‘cos it’s a great story. We also recorded with Valgeir, an Icelandic engineer/producer who was invaluable when it came to translation in the various bars and pubs. I wrote two of the songs at home before seeing any of the script, just Björk describing the scenes over the phone. Getting all the found sound samples was a laugh, recording Icelandic fish factory noises mixing it with Icelandic bra snapping rhythms.

Did you experience the tension that is said to have risen between Björk and Lars Von Tiers during the filming ?

Lars is just a wind up merchant, Björk was really vulnerable during the filming and Lars is an unrelenting teaser. Everyone’s friends now.

lien citation
Markus Dravs

While Dravs has worked with a wide range of artists, possibly the most eccentric he has recorded is Björk. He notes,

“Björk is very poetic in the way she describes the emotion of what she would like to express with a song – she’s adaptable in terms of whether it’s this or that bass-drum for example, but she knows exactly what the function of a particular instrument should be and what image it should portray. She definitely has things mapped out in her head, but there is a fair bit of experimentation going on into how to best transform that into a production.“

Dravs explains that her vocals are often recorded in a very simple fashion.

“A lot of times, Bjork would listen to an almost finished mix and then pick-up a Shure SM57 mic in the control-room, with the speakers on (with a bit of Urei compression on) and re-sing the lead vocal in order to adjust her singing dynamic to what she’s hearing at that point and then lay down a blinding performance, as she has got such great mic technique.

lien citation
Martinez

The Cure would be absolutely amazing to remix ! Also Björk since I love her voice.

lien citation
Mary Ann Hobbs

And I’ll tell you I’ve never told this story a lot but I’ll never forget the day she came into Radio 1 to do her very first mix for this program [Breezeblock, 1998] and she was weraing a little fairy dress and silver wings glued on to the back of it and I said to her "Björk why are you in that outfit ?" and she said "Well, you know what ? Tonight I’m gonna play Icelandic nursery rhymes and a lot of the music I remember listening to as a child, growing up in Iceland. And this would have been the kind of outfit I was wearing when I would have originally heard these tunes..." Phenomenal woman !

lien citation
Matthew Barney

I thought that working with Björk would make it easier to tell a love story, which I also wanted to do. I wanted the piece to operate as a love story, but I believe that our interest in working together on this was probably more to do with the fact that its subject matter that we can both really relate to — this relationship to nature.

lien citation
Melissa Stylianou

She is incredible it’s more than her music. She doesn’t give a shit. She’s getting to that level where you are at pure expression and pure joy. That’s a big hindrance, especially in jazz. You have to get into the music not thinking about what you look like. I’m not saying that I get up onstage in my pajamas, but to concentrate more on the music.

lien citation
Merce Cunningham

Merce also asked me to make music, and I went and saw all of his shows. It became such a big thing in my head. I felt such a big difference between the stuff he did with John Cage and the stuff he did with all the other people, because he lived with John Cage since he was 20. They were like a couple. Merce is so physical, so obviously a dancer, and John Cage was always the more spiritual one. When his music comes on, the whole dance thing all makes sense. Sometimes even with the best composers on earth, you look at the dancers and it looks like they’re lost, just walking in circles, but the minute John Cage’s music comes on it becomes like a sort of cosmic world.

lien citation
Meredith Monk

Björk did one of my songs, ’Gotham Lullaby’. I’d heard her sing that in a performance with the Brodsky String Quartet on an MP3 file one of my [voice] students gave me, and I found it really interesting. Then we met six months ago, and liked each other very much. She’s a lovely spirit.

lien citation
Meredith Monk à propos de Gotham Lullaby

Have you heard the new Björk record, Vespertine ?
« No, but Björk recently did a cover of my song, Gotham Lullaby, on the internet. I haven’t met her but she came to a concert of mine at Lincoln Center last summer. The Lincoln Center Festival presented a three-concert retrospective of my music called Voice Travel. She was at the third one. I like her version of Gotham Lullaby a lot. It’s really interesting, so I’ve been meaning to write to her a card to tell her that I liked it. »

lien citation
Michael McCann

I’m a huge fan of both [Sigur Ros and Björk], and Sigur Ros is a great example of heavily effected production that still doesn’t feel overly electronic. I’m also a huge fan of female vocals, and Björk is a prime example.

lien citation
Michel Gondry

We email and talk all the time. I always think about her for my films but whenever I suggest it she ignores it. The damage has been done by von Trier and she does not believe she can put herself through it again.’ Gondry wanted Bjork in his brilliant new The Science of Sleep star ring Gael Garcia Bernal. ’But she said no, so I got Charlotte Gainsbourg, and I’m happy.’

lien citation
Michel Gondry

When I started to work together with Björk, it was the same thing. So when we did our first video, for Human Behaviour, I was thinking : "Great, we’re going to Iceland and we’re going to shoot a lot of great landscape." And she said no - she had a similar idea as my friend Etienne in Oui Oui, she wanted to use animals to reflect human nature. And it was great, because as soon as she started to throw some ideas, they started to bounce in my mind and imagination and I immediately came back with other ideas, and we did a video that was very collaborative.

This is Hyperballad, with Björk. It was very difficult to choose just one, but in the end I chose this one, partly because I love it, but also because it has a dreamy quality, which fits in with tonight.
Everytime I see it, it makes me think that things get categorised in certain ways - people think of that as a music promo, but actually I would see that as a perfect piece of experimental film-making. Could you talk a little about the creative process to get you to that ?

Björk had a very beautiful idea in this song - she explained to me that the song is about a woman in a relationship, and there are all these inside tensions, but because she wants to preserve the relationship, she goes to the top of the mountain and she lets it go by imagining that she jumps from a cliff and breaks into pieces, thus letting all the negatives out. Then she comes back and she can go on with her life and relationship. That’s what I like about Björk, she’s really a hard worker and she’s very sensitive to the human condition. It sounds so pompous but she takes a very simple, everyday element - like in this case a relationship between a boy and a girl - and find the magic in that, and find how to make it work and use all our creativity to solve problems. So, on my side, once she told me the reason why she wrote this song, I imagined her being dead and alive at the same time. So we had her lying down, with makeup to make her appear dead, and then we had a holographic image of her singing superimposed on her. And this was the first time that I had used motion control, which is this big machine that you can programme and do all this at the same time. So we shot all that on one piece of film by superimposing 14 exposures. I remember my DP was going crazy. He was telling me : "If you screw up one exposure, you’ll ruin all the film." He was against it but I liked the idea that there was a good chance that it could all go wrong, kind of stimulating. And it worked out. We were all sweating when we were projecting this. In my calculations, I had calculated the motion of the camera, but I forgot to add the volume of the screen, and the camera would have crashed into the screen, so right in the middle of shooting, I had to recalculate. But I think it’s really interesting to have a heavy, technical aspect to deal with while making sure that your message comes across. You have to go to the technique to make it happen, so you can’t be too precious about detail, especially in this form of working, where you do everything in the camera. So you can’t look back and say, "Oh maybe that should be a little more blue or green." Those are details, but in the end you just want the piece to make sense.

lien citation
Michel Gondry à propos de Björk

Je vois Björk comme une sœur mais en même temps, je n’oublie pas avoir éprouvé des sentiments très forts pour elle. Je peux même vous avouer que j’en suis tombé amoureux mais j’ai vite compris qu’elle préférait ce qu’on appelle les bad boys (rires). Aussi ai-je été très surpris lorsqu’on m’a rapporté qu’elle me voyait comme quelqu’un de fort alors que je me suis toujours considéré comme l’inverse.

lien citation
Michel Gondry à propos de leur rencontre

Je l’ai rencontrée lors de sa venue à Paris à l’époque du shooting par Mondino de la pochette de Debut. On s’était immédiatement découvert des points communs, comme par ex., le fait d’avoir été élevés par des parents plus ou moins hippies qui nous ont, très jeunes, donnés une grande liberté d’action. On a commencé à parler de choses qu’on aimait afin de voir comment travailler ensemble sur Huma Behaviour. Comme si chacun vidait un sac en toile sur la table du restaurant avec plein de souvenirs, d’envies et d’idées. Je suis retourné au bureau et j’ai construit une histoire. Elle voulait un ours blanc ? Moi, je voulais un loup noir, alors on a tranché, on a fait un ours brun ! C’était plein de petits échanges comme ça.

lien citation
Michel Ocelot à propos de Björk

Björk m’a traité en égal et m’a laissé faire ce que je voulais. Ça reste une belle expérience. Pour la petite histoire, un jour, alors que je faisais une tournée de promotion au Japon, je me baladais dans Tokyo lorsqu’une mélodie s’échappant d’un magasin de disques m’a attiré. Je suis entré et j’ai reconnu sur un écran, ma vidéo. Je me suis vraiment senti citoyen du monde ! Björk et moi avons chacun notre vie et ne nous sommes plus jamais croisés. Je le regrette. Je lui suis éternellement reconnaissant d’avoir pensé à moi. C’est l’une des personnes les plus douées, les plus intègres, les plus puissantes, les plus volontaires que j’ai jamais rencontrées.

lien citation
Mike Enziger (Incubus)

I listen to Bjork probably more than I listen to anyone. She’s so unique that her music inspires me to be more creative. Her melodic sense is very ethereal : There are a lot of heavenly-sounding major 7th movements in her music, a lot of wide voicings.

The music is a strange combination of technology and natural sounds. She’ll take samples of orchestras, drums and strange natural sounds then manipulate them using technology.

Finally, she might lay a huge string section over the whole thing. And she’s got these very jazzy inflections in her voice, a really smokey character that feeds very well into the organic nature of the music.

lien citation
Mike Patton

We met at a festival in Europe a couple years ago. We were fans of each others work. We both agreed we should work together. A year later I saw her in San Francisco and she told me about her interesting all vocal record concept, I told her I was in ! I’m trying to get her in on Peeping Tom and we are talking about doing some touring together. She is one of a kind. She does not worry about what the industry wants from her, she does things her way. She is my kind of artist.

lien citation
Mirwais Ahmadzaï

I ask him who else he’d like to work with in the future ?

Björk… I love her, she’s really talented. I like to work with people from a different side. I’m really intrigued to meet exceptional people.

lien citation
Miya Folick

I wanted to make a record like Björk’s Post that contained many sonic influences but is one cohesive world. (...) Now I listen to a ton of Cocteau Twins, a lot of Björk.

lien citation
Najoua Belyzel

I love Kate Bush, Bjork, Alanis Morisette and Sharleen Spiteri, the singer of the group "Texas".

lien citation
Natalie Merchant

I look at people like Bjork or Beck who are so savvy and sophisticated in their approach to the media and I am sometimes in awe of what they do because it takes so much time and energy and all I really want to do is focus on the craft of being a songwriter.

lien citation
Natasha Khan (Bat For Lashes)

Growing up, Bjork and Kate Bush were really important to me. I get tired of being compared to them and I hope that, as time goes on, I’m going to peel away more and more layers of myself to the point where I’ve made something and become something that isn’t comparable. But I understand why it happens.

As a young teenaged girl, I already had a relationship with music and had already written my own compositions on piano. But until I discovered those artists, it felt like I was missing part of my family. To know your ancestry, to know those who’ve gone before, is hugely important to any budding, young creative people.

When I first heard (Bjork and Bush), I thought, ’Oh, so it’s OK.’ I saw how other people had been interested in the same things as me and had felt as much passion and emotion for sensuality, or spiritual things, or magical, invisible things as I did. Things turned them on the same way they turned me on. It was like getting a pat on the head from an older sister.

lien citation
Natasha Khan (Bat For Lashes)

You are often compared to Björk and Kate Bush ; do those constant comparisons tend to bother you as an artist who is trying to define herself on her own terms ?

No, I mean, I guess that in the past it bothered me, but now I just feel really confident and sure that as time goes on my musical style and my writing is taking a pace of its own, and I think in time the music will speak for itself and people will see that I’m obviously doing something different. Those women are fantastic, strong, risk-taking artists—

—as are you—

—thank you, and that’s a great tradition to be part of, and when I look at artists like Björk and Kate Bush, I think of them as being like older sisters that have come before ; they are kind of like an amazing support network that comes with me.

lien citation
Nathan "Karma" Cox

In my opinion, it (All Is Full Of Love) is the most flawless video ever made. I remember watching that video and wanting to hang up my hat and get a job at a gas station. I watched it over and over and tried to figure out what was digital and what wasn’t.

lien citation
Nathasha Bedingfield

Raw energy, dramatic music, and experimental singing. Björk is queen of expressive music.

lien citation
Nellee Hooper

(Producer of Soul II Soul’s first two LPs, Massive Attack’s ’Blue Lines’ and Sinead O’Connor’s ’Nothing Compares To You’. Producer and part co-writer of ’Debut’.)

Her boyfriend Dom T was working as a DJ in LA. He said we should get together, so we hooked up in London. The initial plan was to do a couple of tracks ... but things went so well we ended up doing the whole album. She’d come up with an original idea, with an overall picture of the song. She liked the way I didn’t take her too literally. She’d say, I want this track to sound like Stockhausen, and I’d play a Quincy Jones loop from an old film score, and she’d say, That’s exactly what I meant.

Björk’s never written a lyric that actually rhymes. Björk works in a language that isn’t Icelandic or English but more of a North Sea gibberish. It’s a specific language with a certain melodic sound she only uses when she writes. It sounds like words, but if you ask her it doesn’t mean anything, and then later she translates it into either Icelandic or English. It’s an original approach to songwriting, just working from melody.

She would arrive, really buzzing from an idea, and we’d literally dive into it, and in a couple of hours, would have something resembling the final product. Of course there were tears and arguments, from both sides, but that’s how you make a good record. But every night we’d go out after recording to a different club, so every morning was a hangover and every evening was a party... She can be quite rude to people who ask her about her music when she’s out.

On holiday in Thailand, in this restaurant with a cocktail bar and piano, someone told the owner she was a singer, and he asked her to sing, so she sang a few standards. The place was full of people who’d never heard of her, mostly older people, American and European, and everyone just stood up and applauded. She just stood there, in a silvery dress, and sang, and won them all over. It was free champagne for the rest of the night. It was like Picasso, who’d walk into a restaurant, sign the napkin and get free food and drink.

lien citation
Nettie Walker

(Björk’s co-manager with Derek Birkett. Ex-A&R co-ordinator at One Little Indian.)

When she did the video for ’Violently Happy’ in LA, she was there in the middle of the earthquake. She described it like, A huge rumbling, deep in your stomach, which is exactly Björk, that she found it a brilliant rather than frightening experience. Everyone was trying to get hold of her to see if she was OK, but she had gone to the video shoot, dead on time, ready to start. That’s how Björk is, committed to doing something... She’s into this magpie mentality. She’s always looking at playing with new people, putting new material into the set, and finding new ways of playing her songs and places to play them, like the Florence Museum Of Modern Art in July. She even did a shop opening in London for Sign Of The Times. She just liked the clothes and the work ethic.

In three words : so many facets.

lien citation
Nick Knight

Numuro : You recently worked with Bjork...

Nick Knight : Yes. I’ve just shot the Pagan Poetry video. You can watch Bjork sewing a wedding dress. The idea is that the devouring passion for her future spouse induces her to sew the dress straight into her skin. It’s a dress by Lee [Alexander McQueen]. It’s incredibly beautiful, made of a very transparent fabric. The structure of the dress is a corset of an antique tulle that seems to be integral part of Bjork. It stops just below her breasts, and she even sews the pearls into her skin. She went far about piercing, believe me.

Numuro : The video will certainly rouse controversy.

Nick Knight : During our first encounter, I realized that she was much stronger and she emanated much more power than her media image let appear. I wanted to show off this power. In this moment, the production is wondering in which countries they’ll be able to release the clip. It’s sure, we’ll put it online on our site showstudio.com.

lien citation
Nick Knight, Directed the music video for ’Pagan Poetry’

I wanted to strip her down. She’s actually quite raw, womanly and sexy. There’s a different side to her that doesn’t come across normally in her videos. That’s what I asked her to do and that’s what she did. Her dress stops just below her breasts and she’s sewn pearls into her skin.

She approached me with the idea. Her original idea in Iceland was to sew pearls into her nipples. She wanted to show her sexuality.

There are two obvious piercings right at the end. If anybody is squeamish they should avoid the last 20 seconds. The piercings are in the back. But it’s not tribal or S&M - it’s about a women’s love for a man.

lien citation
Nick Thornton-Jones

(Nick Thornton-Jones and Warren Du Preez took various pictures of Björk, including the vespertine promo shoot, the "greatest hits" promo shoot and more recently the medúlla promo shoot.)

We shot Björk in New York and then came back here and worked on the pictures for a month. She came down to the studio to help mix the paint, so to speak and brought references, inspirations, ideas - she had a very clear view of how she wanted to see herself. The work is in a lot of space, and there’s a real sense of isolation. There’s also the sense of unreality, which makes iconic work, and as individual pictures that’s we want to achieve. Victoria Bartlett’s a an amazing stylist - her work spans from Italian Vogue to Visionarie - and Björk also brought a group of designers on board called AS FOUR who’d made special pieces for her. We like to work with people on a very three-dimensional level and we tend to work with people who are creative in their own right - we’re very blessed in that fact. If we’re working with someone as creative as Björk, it’s great to welcome them in the studio so they can bring with them what they want, and we can offer them what we’ve got and then hopefully make something unique together.

lien citation
Olivier Alary

She was very into Ensemble’s first album. She had listened to it when doing Vespertine. When she works with people, she is extremely grounded. She knows I don’t care about her appearance or her public image ; what’s important is the voice, and my ability as a musician. She was very humble. She had a lot of respect for my work. It was very nice. She trusted me a lot.

lien citation
Pat Savage

(Accountant with DJ Kilkenny. Worked with The Sugarcubes and now Bjork.)

She is very honest and direct. It brings a smile to my face when she calls me Mr Pat, or sends faxes to that name... The image projected in her videos may suggest she has her head in the clouds but she also has both feet firmly on the ground. She has a good head for figures and is in control of her own destiny, not just in terms of money and property, but her career and life. When The Sugarcubes went through their problems, she was solid. She’s also extremely generous in terms of her time and her finances, and gives credit where it’s due - and even when it might not be due.

lien citation
Paul Fox

(Produced XTC’s ’Oranges and Lemons’, Robyn Hitchcock’s ’Perspex Island’ then The Sugarcubes’ final album, ’Stick Around For Joy’.)

I’d call her the epitome of the woman-child. She gives 100 per cent of everything, she’s always searching out for more, for things that are unique. I’ve never seen anyone quite so amazed and wide-eyed by things... There was definitely tension in the studio when The Sugarcubes made the album — the kind of tension that surrounds a family, but family business always gets taken care of. They never formed for the pursuit of becoming famous : it was just another thing they did.

Björk is one of the few pop artists who is very avant garde, or different to traditional pop music, more like a traditional jazz composer. Sum her up in three words ? An amazing talent.

lien citation
Peter Stormare

How was it for you to act with Björk ?

First of all I love her music. I’ve done for many years. I can proudly say I have her records, which she beautifully signed. She’s very special. I’ve been to Iceland a couple of times and I love it. I love the Icelandic people, I have a couple of friends from Iceland and they’re all very special there. Actually, Björk is a very normal person on Iceland. Anybody who’s been to Iceland knows what it’s like. People are a little bit crazy. Everybody is an artist. You walk into a bar and 9 out of 10 people that are sitting and drinking and screaming there are artists. People work as a mail man or in a grocery shop and they also publish poetry, they write for the theatre or they’re in a amateur group or in a music group. Everybody has a double job and everybody is an artist. It’s a fantastic hidden community.

So I think it was an excellent choice of Lars to use Björk, for her incredible ability of being so unique. I think you need to have been in the production to understand. I’ve never seen anyone work so hard as she. She’s written six major songs for the movie. She has written music in between and come up with ideas for the music, she has constructed the opening and closing themes. She also trained very hard with Vincent Patterson, who is a very demanding guy, together with fifty or sixty dancers. On top of the that she had to learn five sheets of text every day and every night. And she had to improvise too. She had learned the lines and then she had to throw them away and improvise. Which is hard even for any professional actor. And she worked six days a week from 7 o’clock in the morning until 8 o’clock at night for four months.

I have never worked with anybody that had that amount of work, that load on her shoulders. I think it’s a miracle she didn’t die. It’s a miracle she could do it all. I have never been in a production where one person had to do so much. Never. I was expecting her to freak out aal the time, to have fits of screaming. Lars and the production really forgot to take good care of her, because she’s such a humble person and she never complains. It happened lots of time we would break for lunch, there was one person who would break last and who would never get any food and that was Björk. And she’s always coming around serving water and coffee. Fantastic woman.

But I think the production itself they fogot a little bit to take care of her, because she’s so giving. She never complains. If you work 16 hours a day and do everything, you go to bed and your head continues to tick. You don’t get any sleep. After a while, you have no more energy and you start to get sick or get a cold. At the same time she takes of her twelve-year old son and she’s a wonderful mother. So I’ve never seen a person who had so much to do. It’s a miracle that she didn’t kill anyone from the production.

She didn’t have any assistants ?

She had one of her friends helping out, but not a regular service-minded assistant. She doesn’t want to, really. She feels embarassed.

Didn’t the other actors take care of her ?

We did. After a while, certainly. But in the beginning she was so quiet. If you didn’t say anything, people would take her for granted, you know. And it was her first time on a movie, so she wanted to be normal, not to be treated in any special way. But you should be treated specially if you have to write the music, sing, dance and read every day.

You really had to change your voice to sing the parts.
Why didn’t you sing with your own voice ?

This is a hard one, because Björk has written the music for her, it’s not really for anybody else to sing. Even if there’s other voices involved. On the cd she sings everything herself, I think. She’s a very good instructor. Of course I’d like to sing it in a different way but she want to be precise. She’s like the composer, she wants you to try again and hit the notes exactly. She really knows what she wants. And of course it’s easier and more fun to sing as you want, but Björk wants to be really, really precise. It’s in her nature.

lien citation
Peter Stormare

She’s a part of the Nordic light for me who live in Los Angeles. Her revelation is absolutely fantastic and her peering eyes makes one want to laugh.

lien citation
PJ Harvey

I’ve always admired artists I felt were interested in the same thing, in change. For instance, Björk : I can’t say that every one of her records really moved me, but every one of her records seems to be an entire plunge into the unknown, and that really excites me.

lien citation
Plaid

How did you first hook up with Björk ?

Ed : we met her in a club in London, and she wanted us to do a mix for her while we were still in Black Dog. So we did a couple of mixes. And then we just bumped into her a few more times, and her keyboardist dropped out of her tours and we went on and did some support and did some keyboards and programming.

So would you say your visions and Björk’s match pretty well, musically ?

Ed : I think she’s got a fresh outlet. She’s not doing these things for the wrong reasongs. Yeah, in some ways we definitely do. We’re both willing to try sort of new stuff.

Andy : Yeah, the best vision is in every direction at once, isn’t it ? At times you have to focus on one thing in particular, but I think she’s quite open and flexible in terms of creativity.

lien citation
Prince (aka The Artist)

I really like Björk’s stuff. I’m so keen on her sound and her daring attitude.

lien citation
Pyeng Threadgill

I really admire her because she’s taken the genre of pop and is doing some avant-garde stuff. She’s bringing the masses to her and they’re still following.

lien citation
Raphaelle Standell-Preston (Braids)

There are a lot of musicians that we draw from and it’s very vast. Bjork is huge, huge, huge, huge for Raphaelle.

lien citation
Raphaelle Standell-Preston (Braids)

Trying to sing like Björk is how I found my voice, She’s so true to herself.

lien citation
Regina Spektor

I played Connect Festival in Scotland and heard Björk from the stage. She is incredible and i’ve loved her for so long. Then after the show i met her. She is beyond awesome ! I’m speechless about it.

lien citation
Robert Eggers à propos de Björk

Björk, c’est Björk. Ce n’est pas un personnage, c’est elle. J’ai rencontré d’autres célébrités dont l’aura semble fabriquée, fallacieuse, mais avec Björk, il n’y a pas photo. Qui d’autre aurait pu jouer cette devineresse parée de bijoux mieux qu’elle ?

Björk a une personnalité de chamane, personnellement et dans l’inconscient du public, donc ce rôle n’était pas si éloigné d’elle.

lien citation
Rufus Wainwright

She’s amazing. As usual, I’m jealous of Bjork. I have only one French horn player [when performing at Coahella], she has many more.

lien citation
Russell Kearney

(Engineer on Homogenic)

We process a lot of stuff in our Akai samplers. There were really no rules. Before I got here, she even used the grand piano in the living room as a reverb. They just put a speaker underneath, blasted out some sounds, and got gorgeous results.

lien citation
RZA

She’s Vegas !

We brought in some of the New York Philharmonic orchestra, mixed up hip-hop and saxophone. You can rock it inside a techno club or on the radio. Just like Las Vegas ! A lot of people, they scared to be around us sometimes, but Björk just runs around goin’, ’Ark ark ark !’ It’s like we from the same motherfuckin’ cusp. She’s unorthodox.

lien citation
Scott Roger


(Tour manager The Sugarcubes from 1988-92.)

She’s not on this planet, or from it, in the nicest possible sense. On tour she would disappear, and you wouldn’t see her again until soundcheck. Then straight after she would disappear again and turn up five minutes before the show... She once bought a pair of Adidas trainers, pre-1970’s, and wanted to get four inches added onto the sole. Trying to explain that in German was tough, but we managed it, and paid $200 just to do it. It was like that all the way. She’d spend a lot of time around NASA in Texas, buying silver jackets and astronaut food.

Björk in three words : godlike, inspirational and genius.

lien citation
Shirley Manson (Garbage)

She’s a visionary genius and a musical genius, and I love how unique she is and how she does things on her own terms.

lien citation
Siggi Baldursson

(Drummer/founder member of Kukl and The Sugarcubes. The man behind the mambo spoof ’Bogomil Font & The Millionaires’ album. Currently playing percussion in Bjork’s band.)

Björk was a refugee from the post-punk revolution in Iceland. She was 15 but always looked much younger. She must have a time machine built in somewhere...

Towards the end of The Sugarcubes she would often disappear - like in Berlin, she’d be alone in some crazy Turkish bar full of Turkish men, fooling around on her own. But she was always very cool : she was never afraid of getting drugged or mugged or raped, to the point of making you feel uneasy, but she somehow got away with it. No, she’s not much of a herd animal...

In three words : sneaky fucking bitch !

lien citation
Skunk Anansie

We’re labelmates with Björk - signed to the same independent label in England - and one of the people at the label played her our album. She was just about to release the "Army of Me" single and she stumbled upon the idea of getting us to do a rock version of the song. It was recorded and mixed in something like seven hours. When she heard it she asked us to do ’Top of the Pops’ [British TV show] with her, which we all mashed up.

lien citation
Sônge

What interests or influences do you draw from when you write music ?
(...) Of course, I’m also inspired by music. I like Björk, I think she was one of the first musical tornadoes I got wrapped up in.

lien citation
Sophie Ellis-Bextor

thefemalemojo : What kind of music are you listening to at the moment ?

Sophie : Basement Jaxx album, Junkie XL, Thirteen:13, Nelly Furtado and i’m looking forward to the new Bjork album. I’d like to do a song with her one day. A really good modern female duet would be good, i can’t really think of a good female duet. Might be good to revive that

lien citation
Sopho Khalvashi

What do you think about the comparison which is being made between your style and the Icelandic pop star Björk ?

When I am on the stage I try to be faithful to my own manner and my own style, and what is the most important, to be myself. I always thought that the sincerity is one of those things that is able to attract people’s attention and sympathy. I do not think that Björk and I are a lot alike and you cannot judge only based on one song that you heard. You are very welcome to listen to my international album “Visionary Dream“ and see the whole picture of my music. I am sure you will definitely change your mind.

lien citation
Speedy J

(Aka Jochem Paap, Dutch wizaard op de teckno. Remixed ’Human Behaviour’.)

One Little Indian asked me to remix ’Human Behaviour’, Bjork then asked me to play as the support act as a show in Wolverhampton. My first impressions were that she travels with a lot of people and she wants everybody to be happy, and she tried very hard, which I liked about her. As an artist, she seemed to be very open-minded to other kinds of music. She likes to look for the least obvious thing... With ’Human Behaviour’, rather than do a house mix with a 125 beats-per-minute under it, I kept the song intact, with more vocals than were on the original and a more electronic sound, something closer to Kraftwerk. She said she liked it very much but not particularly what she liked about it...

lien citation
Spike Jonze

Then there was his video for Björk’s It’s So Quiet, a riff on the "ordinary people" approach of a Jacques Demy musical that could have been the beginning of something bigger. "We shot in two days what should have taken four," he says, "and we just had so much fun, and we talked about doing a musical together some time, in the same spirit."

Then Lars von Trier offered Bjork the lead in Dancer In the Dark, his harrowing musical that combines Death Row and The Sound of Music, a movie in which the musical sequences happen in the character’s imagination. It was the very idea that Bjork and Jonze had been discussing. Before Bjork took the role, he says, "she rang me and asked if that was OK", a considerate touch he appreciated.

lien citation
Stephane Sednaoui

(Video director whose work includes U2’s ’Mysterious Ways’, Red Hot Chili Peppers’ ’Give It Away’ and The Black Crowes’ ’Sometimes Salvation’. Currently working on Björk’s live video.)

We’ve been trying not to make the live video look like an interview, because she has done so many, but more like abstract, dreamy portraits. It’s not reportage, following her everywhere. She could be on the subway, or talking about waiting at airports or a dream. Different images open other doors... She reminds me of an actress like Anna Magnani, the wife of Roberto Rossilini, where all inside, her emotions, shows on the face. But it’s not tortured, just everything is real, all pure. In three words : emotional, alive, shining.

lien citation
Stéphane Sednaoui

I discovered her music before the album [Debut] was released, and I was like ahhhh ! What an amazing artist. It is so fresh so pure so powerful !

lien citation
Stephane Sednaoui

Two years after the Big Time Sensuality video, we did another, for a song called Possibly Maybe. And it was more intense and more like things... inside of her. I love the video because she is very cute. We were trying to show a little more fragility or sensitivity. And you see her maybe more in contrast. So it was a precious video for me.

lien citation
Susana Baca

Björk is a voice of the modern age. She takes me back to my twenties.

lien citation
Taylor Eigsti

I love any music that has vibrant energy. You hear Björk eight times, and then, suddenly, on the ninth time, you hear what she’s really doing.

lien citation
The Tea Party

Beauty..Björk..& the beast..Tricky.

lien citation
Thom Yorke

I’m trying to get Radiohead to do a cover [of Unravel] because I think it’s one of the most beautiful songs I’ve ever heard.

lien citation
Thomas Dolby

Thomas Dolby is an English musician best known for his 1982 synth pop hit "She Blinded Me With Science".

Björk, as we know, is not of this earth. To me, she’s the most single astonishing artist of the last 20 years.

lien citation
Timbaland

A lot of people think it’s weird her working with me, but I think it’s how she sings on top of my beats that make it.

lien citation
Timbaland

Working with Björk was incredible, it was like working with myself. She is so creative and unafraid to take chances.

lien citation
Tori Amos

She came backstage to see me at my show two years ago. I had been aware of her because of The Sugarcubes and I went to Iceland because I wanted to go so bad. I’d been fascinated by it and studied a bit about it so I eventually went. Everybody, like, gets drunk, don’t they ?

lien citation
Tori Amos

That was big news in Australia, because Bjork just arrived in
Bangkok and obviously lost her cool with a young Thai reporter who greeted
her with a welcome to Thailand, and actually got hit by Bjork as she
arrived.

Well, I don’t know about that. I mean, from what I understand... and
Bjork is a good acquaintance, and a *lovely, lovely, lovely* lady. And I’ve
known her for a while, and never seen her lose her patience. And her son was
with her, and I think that you saw the mother lion come out protecting her
cub. That’s what I truly think happened from what I gather. I think people
saw the mother come out as Bjork, and nobody’s really seen that. You see the
playful, young, quote-unquote "woman", but the mother is quite, ah,
powerful, wonderful and protective. And I think any mother would protect her
child the same way if she felt it was being harassed.

lien citation
Tori Amos

The reason I love [the It’s Oh So Quiet] video is because I think it captured the personality of this very special person, who is Björk, and having had a giggle with her in my life, I just feel this video really represents a side to her that is very special.

lien citation
Tori Amos

I kick on people, and I don’t care what they do. I don’t have to be a friend with well-known rock ‘n’ rollers to work myself up. I force no contacts, and my manager doesn’t have to arrange so-called spontaneous jam sessions, or something like that. But recently I met Björk, and she’s exactly how I picture my best friend of the future. She’s so free and full of wild ideas and without pose or false pretences. Also, she doesn’t have this cramped rock and roll habit to wake all sorts of demons in herself. She sees creativity wider than that. A wonderful person. I don’t see her as a musician, rather like the phenomenon Björk. I had the same feeling with Evan Dando of the Lemonheads. In my songs I am open, but I am still fighting with all sorts of problems. Björk and Evan seem to have passed that stage. Their work is pure life’s joy and childish openness. I have thought a lot about that lately : why am I still in the cellar groveling between the rats, whereas Björk and Evan are upstairs cooking ? And it smells so darn good there... I still need my songs to cope with my double cursing of feelings of religious and sexual guilt. And I would like by now to peek in the kitchen upstairs...

lien citation
Toumani Diabaté

She wanted everything to work naturally. In Mali, I played and she sang, trying lyrics she had brought until the syllables fit and they had a few songs. She chose “Hope“ and handed another one to me. She said, ‘Take this and use it any way you like.’ I couldn’t imagine a superstar doing that. She opened a new door for the kora.

lien citation
Toumani Diabate

She’s very nice. She listened to ’New Ancient Strings’ and decided to include kora in her music. She spent the week in Bamako, going to the market to go shopping. She was very cool, not playing the big superstar.

lien citation
Toumani Diabate

Both Konono and Toumani Diabate – they changed my music. Toumani Diabate especially. I mean, he’s a virtuoso of highest degree. Playing with him was such a privilege, because his kora playing just makes your head want to fall off. I went to Mali for a week and we tried several things – and I’m going to meet him more often here. It makes we want to shout and scream, it’s exciting.

lien citation
Trevor Hall

I’d love to collaborate with Bjork. I’ve got her lyric "All is Full of Love" tattooed on my arm. I’m pretty much a Bjork fanatic.

lien citation
Tricky

She’s a professional. She can deal with it. She could go to a club and people would fuck with her and she could deal with it. But she’s been doing it since she was 11. It weren’t no love thing. We needed each other at that time. I met her ; she supported me, I supported her, boom.

lien citation
Tricky

We never really had a relationship, if y’know what I mean. We were in weak states, and just leant on each other.
She demands quite a lot as a person, and she’s really into giving, she’ll give you everything, love and all that. But I can’t handle that. She’s got a bit of a fairy-tale life. She wants to be in love. And we got into a stupid argument. She asked me if I love her, and I said, ’No, I don’t. Do you mean, do I need you ? You’re a wicked person, but I can’t say I’m in love with you." And then it all went up in the air, and she had her heart broken, and I left. But I think she thought she was in love with me, or she liked the thought of two people being in love.

lien citation
Valgeir Sigurdsson

Driving through the ash-black lava fields around Reykjavik airport to his home studio, the Greenhouse, the isolation that Sigurdsson’s clients agree to becomes clear. It is here in the suburban sprawl in the hills around the city, in a street built for artists in the 1970s, that he and Björk first conceived their philosophy of "domestic music".

"She would bounce crazy ideas off me, like making a song out of all the sounds in the kitchen. Quite early on, the conceptual side existed in [her Vespertine of 2001] : the intimacy of the vocal performance, and using chamber music, because that was created in the home."

Sigurdsson grew up in an Icelandic fishing town of 1,000 people. At nine, he learned to play guitar from his Anglophile cousins’ punk records. He soon moved on to Kraftwerk, Prince and classical music, and in his teens invested in a sequencer and drum machine. His break came when Björk invited him to engineer her songs for the Lars von Trier musical Dancer in the Dark (2000). By the end, as well as recording her soundtrack album, Selma Songs, he was synching her music into the film and recording a 90-piece orchestra.

’’People are proud of her. It’s good for us that the figurehead for Icelandic music is so odd and individual."

"She would bounce crazy ideas off me, like making a song out of all the sounds in the kitchen. Quite early on, the conceptual side existed in [her Vespertine of 2001] : the intimacy of the vocal performance, and using chamber music, because that was created in the home."

lien citation
Vincent Paterson

Björk came in the first day with a checkered dress with sleeves to her knees, jeans, and red shoes with little taps on her toes. I fell in love immediately. The naïveté and originality of her body language always made my work seem so organic and fascinating. I love the way she moves.

lien citation
Vitalic

You are having a party whom, dead or alive, is on the guest list ?

Björk, Chris Cunningham, Aphex Twin, Giorgio (Moroder), Bill Murray, Scarlett Johansson.

lien citation
Warren Du Preez

I love Vespertine, ’cause it sounds like she’s in love. I mean, who needs all that "I’m so fucked up" stuff, right ? Not me.

lien citation
Wayne Coyne

Her first record, to me, is one of the best you could ever have. She gets a little too weird at certain times, but then, I love the weirdness.

lien citation
Will Oldham (Bonnie Prince Billy)

a few years ago, our friend King Henry introduced us, by phone, to Bjork. then in Reykjavik was eating in a restaurant and she walked by, so Bonny ran out and said hello. we went to geysers and waterfalls then, she a very very gracious rep. some more little times were spent, and good vibes reigned. also there was a friend of hers, a poet, whose book is around here somewhere...
and then Botch called a little while ago and said I was invited to come along on these shows. at the time, it was a vine thrown into the quicksand at which bonny leapt and clawed.

we saw her show in Denmark a few weeks ago, and it was great. all of these shows, fairly sure, are out of doors, and observing the mounting of it all, and playing out of doors, and the music all around...plus, on stage with her is drew of matmos, who is a very longtime acquaintance from louisville. he said it would be good to have more americans on the trek, the scoundrel.

lien citation
Will Oldham (Bonnie Prince Billy)

A few years ago I did a tour opening for Björk, and I met this guy, Valgier Sigurdsson, who was doing programming and engineering stuff for her. We’d hang out sometimes backstage and talk about the possibility of recording things together in Iceland. I was flattered and happy that he was so interested, and it seemed like an interesting adventure, but ultimately not a very feasible one.

Later, as I was working on new songs, I was eventually asked by Björk to come and sing on a song she was doing for Matthew Barney’s Drawing Restraint film. So I went and did that and ran into Valgier again. He asked me again about coming to Iceland to record, so finally I was just like “Okay, let’s go.“ We were in Iceland for a couple of weeks and it was winter there, so it was pretty disorienting. It was always dark.

lien citation
Will Oldham (Bonnie Prince Billy)

You toured with Bjork this past summer. How did that relationship start ? How did someone like Bjork hear a Will Oldham record ?

Bjork was friends with Harmony Korine, and we were going to play Iceland four years ago, and Harmony said “you should call Bjork.“ So we hooked up with her when we went to Reykjavik, and it was great, and we would e-mail every now and again, and kept up the communication, and when she went out on tour, she asked me to open.

Was that a good experience ? I mean, in Los Angeles you played the Hollywood Bowl. Was that a total shock ?

I try to make “total shock“ a sort of habit. So, in some ways in was, but that was a good thing. The Hollywood Bowl was the biggest audience I’d ever played in front of, and more than half of them were vocally discouraging, and that was awesome, you know ? That was so good.

But did you have doubts about going on that tour, since you’ve said you don’t want your music to be part of the mainstream ?

No, I figured there was no chance that anyone would give a shit about my set, so I just figured that I was gonna do these songs and most people would forget about ’em, since they paid sixty bucks to see Bjork and once she came on that’s all they cared about.

lien citation
Zeena Parkins à propos de Dancer in the Dark

Elle jure qu’elle n’est pas faite pour être actrice, mais elle a parfaitement su se créer un personnage. C’est une femme qui sait utiliser les caméras.

lien citation